The Quality Makers: Brett Heyman of Edie Parker

Tell me about the name Edie Parker.

My oldest kid and only daughter is named Edie. I started Edie Parker after I had her – she was born in September and I founded the brand in January. We had such a difficult time naming our daughter, and when I was naming my brand, I thought, I'm not doing that again. So I decided to just reuse the name. Parker is my husband’s mother's maiden name, also his middle name and my daughter's middle name. So that’s how it came to be: Edie Parker.

Please introduce your brands: Edie Parker and Flower by Edie Parker.

We speak about them as one brand. Edie Parker is a cannabis lifestyle brand, launched back in 2010. It started as a line of acrylic clutches, very much influenced by their mid century predecessors. I had been collecting vintage acrylic bags from the 50s and 60s. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I was always thrifting, going to Melrose and the Rose Bowl on the weekends. I collected tons of bags over the years, but as I got older and moved to New York, I had to get rid of a lot. The acrylic bags are always the ones I kept. 

Anytime I wore the bags, people would always ask me about them. There was this great sense of nostalgia – either “my grandma had a bag like that” or “that’s so cool, where did you get that?” I covered accessories for a lot of my career, working with brands like Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. After I had my first daughter, my hectic travel life simply wasn’t sustainable anymore and I really wanted to do something more creative. Based on my lifelong collection and my experience in handbags, I believed there was an opportunity to recreate those bags for a new generation, especially as they were becoming increasingly harder to find. So we started just with handbags, they were very red carpet, and later we began adding categories like home in 2016. But I kept asking myself: what does the world need more of? 

This idea of cannabis continued coming up due to the so-called “green wave” out West. I had been going to dispensaries in LA, and I just couldn't believe how beautiful they were, how out of the shadows cannabis had become. I thought: how can we participate in this space in a way that feels authentic? I began thinking about coming into the cannabis world through accessories, almost the way people made bar accessories. I started to see everything gelling together in my vision. We tapped into this romance around bar carts, smoking accessories and beautiful ashtrays with multi-purpose use. But what struck me was that there were no flower brands that really spoke to women in terms of the kinds of cannabis experiences we want to have. Sure, cannabis is great for anxiety, health and wellness, anti-inflammatory reasons as well, but it's also just fun to get high. 

While we launched our accessories, we also launched Flower by Edie Parker in California. We created these beautiful flower jars that simply didn’t exist at the time. We launched colored glass jars in beautiful gold foil, with outdoor sun-grown California weed from the Emerald triangle, and it was just beautiful. Six years later, here we are.

What is your relationship to cannabis like? How did it influence the creation of your brand?

I don't consider myself a stoner. I smoked weed throughout high school and college, and then when I was working in New York, I didn't see it that much anymore. When I started dating my husband, he had a lot of access to cannabis, so it came back into my life. But I used it then in the way I use it now, even though we have so much more access to it nowadays. I like to get high and watch a movie. I like to get high and have sex. I like to use cannabis to go to sleep. But I don't need to wake up and get high to be creative. When creating, I have the future customer of cannabis in mind.

Giving myself permission to say: this is a consumer product that you engage with, just like any other consumer product in your life, was a big step. You know that feeling when you walk into a store and feel attracted to something? I wanted to recreate that in the cannabis space. I had been buying from certain brands for 15 years, and they felt reliable, consistent and safe. Where I think we add value in the cannabis landscape, is normalizing cannabis and making it unintimidating. Our products are not necessarily for the heavy hitter, every day, esoteric strain person. And we know that. We don't pretend to be that. But we believe we add a very valuable element to the conversation within mainstream education.

Your website states your products are “crafted for a good time.” I'm curious how that relates to women in cannabis – giving ourselves permission to get high and have fun.

That has been our brand ethos through and through. I always say: we're in a frivolous business, especially when we were just accessories. Nobody needs a handcrafted acrylic clutch, so if you're gonna spend money on it, it's because it brings you joy. We don’t take ourselves that seriously, and neither do our customers. We make something special and different. You shouldn't have to enter a dispensary and only be presented with medicinal and/or medical options, things that feel really masculine. You should be able to go in and be wowed. Pink and green striped packaging feels really fun. We want you to think: my vape is so colorful and when I’m hitting it, it lights up in this beautiful glow. 

That mindset translates to our accessories as well. Cannabis accessories have historically been things that you're supposed to hide in a shoe box or in the back of a drawer. They were never made to be on display. We take the absolute opposite approach: not only should you display this, you should gift it and you should be proud of it. A lot of the stuff we make, like our beautiful, big glass pipes, even if you don't smoke, it's a great object for your coffee table. 

Tell me more about the different products you offer.

We do handbags, ashtrays, lighters, pipes, grinders, rolling papers, 510 threads, batteries, and more. We elevate products that exist and innovate products that don't. The most common misconception about us is that we're this very expensive brand. There’s certainly a spectrum of how much our products cost, but in terms of grinders, papers and all that, we're not more expensive than other brands. We try to elevate the design of items – to be really thoughtful, and  kind of cheeky. Like, here’s this really fun grinder that looks good on your table, or here's a really great lighter that’s so fun when you pull it out of your bag. 

In terms of innovation, we have a whole handbag collection called Burn, where we created this attachable yet retractable lighter in great gold and silver materials. We also have a Bejeweled version. Whether or not you're a smoker, a lighter is always handy, and when a flame goes out, here you are, the hero. Everybody always wants a lighter and we really like to make things that are conversational.

Something I also want to mention that I’m very proud of: last week we launched a partnership with Wes Anderson for his new film. There’s an old tobacco pipe in the film, and it reminded them of a lighter cover we do with gemstones, so they reached out to us for a collaboration. 

I’d love to hear about your creation and design process. Where does your inspiration come from, especially as someone with a background in fashion?

A lot of my inspiration starts with something old. The bags draw from the post WWII period in America, where we were setting fashion trends globally, using all these innovative materials. Back in the day, it wasn’t fashion designers who made acrylic brands, it was these guys that worked in car manufacturing who had access to new materials and were playing around with them. I love the sense of craftsmanship that comes from all these unexpected materials and unique color combinations. When I’m thrifting or antiquing, and I find a weird ashtray object, or a cigarette holder, I think about how we can make that feel like Edie Parker. How can we update a vintage object, modernize it and customize it, to meet our audience’s needs?

What do you believe differentiates you from other brands in the industry?

There's not a lot of brands that are like us in this industry, and we've been around for 15 years! Edie Parker means something to people. We have a clear and defined aesthetic. A lot of people in cannabis are legacy growers, or they have very cool, high-quality products, but we are a true lifestyle brand. You can shop lots of different categories from us, and they all evoke the same feeling. We sell items that are elevated, ones that could be fashion and culture items, but can also be used for smoking.

In addition, we're very women forward. We're women owned, all those in the office are women, and so we primarily make things for women. But frankly, we’ve evolved to much more than that. We like to say we're for all smokers with style. Having our consistent brand message out there, for all this time, really distinguishes us. People can identify us and look for us in their local dispensaries. In a business that’s federally illegal, it’s really challenging to achieve that.

We're in 11 states now, which is fantastic. It's been a real labor of love and grit, and we're opening in 3 more states later this year. In order to achieve that, we work hard to find the best manufacturers, who have the best access to flower, the best retail networks, the best distribution capacity, etc. You can’t ship cannabis across state lines, so we have to pick different strains and different partners in every state that we're in. We don’t sell weed directly on our website, so if you live in California, anything you smoke has to be grown in California.

What do you hope people will take away from your products when engaging with them?

We really want people to have permission to smoke weed and not be ashamed of it. People underestimate the stigma that is still associated with weed. I was at my son's graduation party the other day, and there was a woman who lived next door, smoking a joint in her backyard. Everybody was almost appalled, but if she were out there having a glass of wine, nobody would say anything. We’re up against a lot, so we're not making things that are pretty because it's frivolous. We're making things that are pretty because we want you to say: this is going to be on my table, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'd like to keep doing this forever, because I love it, I love our team and I’m so proud that we've been able to accomplish something so special.

Be stylish and unserious with Edie Parker’s one-of-a-kind cannabis-adjacent fashion accessories.