We were lucky to catch up with Alan and Juan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alan and Juan, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
So I think like many businesses, ours started in a college dorm room. It was 2021, our freshman year, and a huge snowstorm had hit Austin. If you don’t quite remember, that was the first year where the Texas grid wasn’t really prepared for it, and half the state lost power. Luckily for us, UT dormitories had backup generators, and we got the whole week off from school.
As two very respectable college aged males, we decided the best thing we could do was “socialize with the peers on our floor” by drinking and smoking weed for a week straight. To be frank, it was one of the best weeks of college in our lives. If the parents are reading, then no it wasn’t and I never wrote this.
Somewhere during that week we sadly broke our bong. It was our first glass piece, and without it, all we were left with was a bunch of bud and no way to smoke it. Out of this conundrum, this absolutely critical and historical moment, we found a customer need and we prototyped the first Toki. We had a metal straw on us, and we realized that if we poked it into a water bottle, we could make a makeshift bong out of it. It was very janky and to be honest it didn’t really work (there was no way to put a bowl on it well enough), and so we started brainstorming how it could actually work. It would be a metal tube, like a downstem, with a mouth that could hold a 14mm bong bowl, that you could stick into things to make bongs! To our high selves it sounded like a genius idea, but after that night’s bender we came back to reality and got back to our normal school grind. It wasn’t until years later that we actually decided to circle back to it, and create what is Toki today.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Juan and I (Alan) are two UT students who became best friends through cannabis. Like most Gen Z freshman students, we bonded over cannabis with several like-minded friends, and have had countless memories with it since. We are business students, and we both believe in the value of cannabis, its potential, and the transformative effect it has brought for countless people and our society as a whole.
We made our flagship product, the Toki, out of that origin story in the freshman dormitories. As college students we feel like we loved the experience of smoking real weed (flower) out of bongs, but it was hard to do that on a whim, even more so while traveling. We needed something that was discrete and robust, as well as something very portable that we could take on trips with us. The Toki solves this, it lets you turn any hollow object into a bong with a discrete, portable, and TSA-safe tool. Think of it as the swiss army knife of cannabis – the last tool a stoner needs in their arsenal.
As a brand we want to take the best parts about the Toki and apply it to many things in the flower industry. We want to be a high quality brand that takes a classy and minimalist approach to our design and aesthetic. We feel that most of the cannabis industry is loud, messy, and almost trashy – the aesthetic and design isn’t prioritized as it should be. We are creating a brand that creates the highest quality products with the highest quality design and thought put into them. While we only sell the Toki right now, we are also creating a new functional bowl design, aesthetic and high quality rolling papers, and much more.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Coming from UT’s flagship business school, we thought we knew what we were doing with our LLC, but this was not the case given our unique industry, small size, and undetermined scope. A big part of this was due to us starting in such an unregulated market and taboo industry. One big lesson we had to unlearn was that just because a market is stigmatized today does not mean there’s no potential – think of the countless successful products grandpa whines about today.
But the biggest mismatch between classroom and real life was how the business should be run, namely what we had to prioritize. We noticed that our education was preparing us for America’s corporate world, and we realized that our small accessories business should not have the same finance and accounting pipeline as a multinational company. Furthermore, we were never taught how to sell (which is crazy since that’s the most important skill in business)!!
Therefore, we had to unlearn a lot of the “textbook” corporate knowledge, corporate etiquette, accrual accounting, corporate finance – anything corporate. Instead, we picked up on the fact that most internet-based brands today benefit the most from sales, marketing, and branding investment, and that a homemade “personal touch” is not to be shunned. We still have countless Excel models that belong in an investment bank rather than our drive; we haven’t touched those sheets in ages, and today our priority is making content, innovating on our product, and selling and marketing it.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
Alan: Juan and I met in Jester West (the best freshman year UT dorm if you haven’t heard of it). I had arrived a semester late due to COVID, so my first day there I knocked on every door on my floor because I didn’t want to be miserable and alone. I first met Juan’s roommate Steve(now one of my closest friends), and at the time didn’t think much. Juan came a few days later from his winter break, and one night early in the semester we had found ourselves eating dinner together. I didn’t know them much at all at the time, but I decided to take a gamble and ask if they wanted to hit my dab pen, I’ll never forget their disbelief, they were shocked at me, a CS Major(at the time) Asian guy asking if they wanted to rip the pen. Fast forward and we are a very tight group of friends. After that we hung out most days the rest of that semester, and had many, many memories from parties to edible nights and more. We had similar interests and I think both of us were entrepreneurial, so it was inevitable that we would try to start something together. I’m very grateful to have met and shared so many memories with Juan, and we are excited to build Toki into something we are both very proud of.
Juan:
I met Alan after my roommate Steve introduced me to him as one of the many new kids that had come late due to COVID. We all grabbed dinner that night and I was surprised to see him pull out a dab pen in front of all of us. He smoked all of us out, and quickly I realized this bold individual was very similar to me. We then naturally bonded over a shared passion for EDM (shoutout Tchami), the outdoors, options trading, philosophy, and, well, cannabis. Our friend group has stuck together through the years and have shared apartments countless times. Little did I know, Alan would be dumb enough to go all-in on a cannabis accessories business with me, and the rest is history. Embarking on this journey together has topped any business class I’ve ever taken; I’ve gotten the most hands-on training possible, met a ton of amazing people and innovative brands, all for the price (or initial investment) of a semester of tuition!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.smoketoki.com
- Instagram: @smoketoki
Image Credits
The professional Toki product photos with the green background was done by Brian from ofmindmedia.com. We’d appreciate it if you could credit his photography business along with his name.