“Most things celebrities do absorb more attention,” responded Rogen. “It’s not like I’m a real celebrity. It’s not like Chris Evans is behind this,” Rogen said while laughing. “On the grand scale, celebrities are very low on the pecking order. I don’t even know if I am a celebrity since I haven’t been in a Marvel movie.”
When hearing that Seth Rogen was attending TechCrunch Disrupt, the first thought that comes to mind is either, “this is movie related” or “this is weed-related.”
The latter is undoubtedly true.
Rogen’s company called Houseplant is a two-part company with the House and the Plant referring to its products. The company offers chic and designer-centric home goods that currently include porcelain designed by world-renowned potter Adam Field. Field has designed and signed these cups that can double as an ashtray as each cup has a little section to hold a lit join without dropping ash everywhere. The goods include ashtrays, cups and lighters, and the company is looking to expand its product line to adding even hanging ashtrays down the line.
But, the central theme is based on a single product: cannabis.
“We’ve sold house goods in all 50 states at this point,” Seth Rogen explained. “That’s us, developing a relationship and trust with customers in places where weed is not legal yet.”
“That’s the ethos of our launch,” said chief commerce officer Haneen Davies. “You can talk about house goods the way you can talk about any product, and to us, they’re very much linked to cannabis and a cannabis lifestyle. But we can gain the trust of a national audience and be in many homes across the nation while we wait for cannabis to follow.”
This is where the second part of the business, “Plant,” comes into play.
Not only does the company provide products for pot smokers, but Houseplant also provides high-quality cannabis for users who are looking for a more refined strain of the product.
“And that was important to me,” he said. “As someone who buys tons of weed and smokes a ton of weed, I like to open the container and see big, giant, pretty buds.”
TechCrunch interviewer Matt Burns then asked Rogen how his celebrity status may have attracted more attention for this cannabis company considering most cannabis companies fly under the radar.
“Most things celebrities do absorb more attention,” responded Rogen. “It’s not like I’m a real celebrity. It’s not like Chris Evans is behind this,” Rogen said while laughing. “On the grand scale, celebrities are very low on the pecking order. I don’t even know if I am a celebrity since I haven’t been in a Marvel movie.”
When asked about the company’s eventual success due to his celebrity status, Rogen began comparing the start of a company to the launch of a movie.
“My involvement doesn’t inherently mean success will follow,” said Rogen. He went on to joke about how he has been involved in several movies that were not successful.
Rogen refers to films such as 2011’s The Green Hornet, which was widely considered a box-office failure despite having a large amount of funding and a star-studded cast of celebrities, including Rogen, Christoph Waltz and Cameron Diaz.
There are dozens of instances of celebrity startups similar to this that met failure, and his company will not inherently succeed or fail based on his celebrity status, Rogen explained. Despite this being the case, however, Rogen remains passionate about the mission of Houseplant, and he mentioned how important the visual aspects of marijuana products were to him.
Overall, the company’s goal is to make recreational marijuana use more broadly accepted, which is why the Houseplant is so focused on creating pieces of art that anyone would want to have in their house.
“At the same time, it’s destigmatizing weed,” said Rogen. “It’s showing that weed products can be beautiful and deserve to be in Architectural Digest. They don’t just belong to, you know, the person selling you rolling papers at the bong shop. They don’t have to be tie-dyed or rubber. They can be something you’re proud to display in a home that you’re proud to have. I think it’s nice because there’s a lot of things serving one another.”
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