Ever pay $7 for a pack of papers and lighter that you’ll lose the next day anyway? You’re not alone.
In August 2015, Harrison Baum was an avid cannabis enthusiast working at Vistaprint as a fraud specialist for their website builder. In a sea of talented developers and designers, he was at the bottom of the totem pole, reviewing shady businesses that nobody wanted to see.
He paid his entire college tuition fixing iPhones and felt an entrepreneurial itch once again. He needed a change. Baum saw another subscription service pop up on his Facebook feed and thought, ‘Wow, I could do this for a dollar!’ After creating a scrappy website and buying $700 worth of materials, he put the idea on Reddit /trees. Within hours it had topped r/trees, Baum gained his first few hundred subscribers overnight, and walked right out of his day job.
It was his dream come true. He made a product and hundreds of people wanted it! Baum remembers calling up his closest friends in the beginning, desperately asking for help packing and going to Walmart to buy their ENTIRE supply of incense. But the dream fizzled quickly. The Reddit post was deleted for “advertising” and traffic to the site stopped dead in its tracks. At the time, there was no solid plan and Baum had no idea how to market the business. Even worse, the payment system got shut down! He needed to network with businesspeople in his industry; he needed help.
Baum started by networking at the D.C. State fair, where interestingly enough they had a cannabis competition! It blew his mind. He had never seen a true cannabis plant before, and he had definitely not expected to see one at a government sponsored event. A girl came up approached Baum with a flier for another event called Women Grow. Despite obviously not being a woman, she encouraged him to come anyway and meet some awesome people. They ended up throwing the best cannabis networking events in D.C. and Baum started building his network from there, slowly laying the groundwork to developing the dream team the company has today.
A huge moment for the young business was 4/20/2016 – when it nabbed the #1 spot on Reddit videos for our parody video (which was taken down, unfortunately). The team spent months working on this video, detailing out every piece. Baum’s head literally explodes in the first 10 seconds; they drove out to rural Virginia and shot a watermelon with his face on it. The spectacle included a painting they made of Abe Lincoln smoking a J, and Baum even had to rush order a pineapple tie on eBay. And then, the finale: Cheetos flying through the air like confetti as motorcycles and dancers circled Baum. The plan was to pay a bunch of Twitter influencers to all retweet it at once, but the company’s account was frozen right after they launched the video! It was a disaster. All the work seemingly went to waste. But there was one last weapon in the stockpile: Reddit. They put up the video and it soared. The video has since been removed from YouTube, but it was a major step forward in the evolution of DHC.
Baum originally started packing by hand in his bedroom, but quickly had to move to the living room of the 6-person-group home he was living in. With added help, the team upgraded to the garage. However, soon a freezing winter settled in and the cramped garage became unbearable. Competition was getting fierce and Baum was realizing he didn’t know what he was doing. And then everything went to shit. One night in Baum’s sleep his shoulder socket tore apart, painfully reversing a socket repair surgery he had after a bad skiing accident when he was 19. In the midst of trying to get the business off the ground, Baum had to get a Latarjet shoulder socket reconstruction. It was a complicated surgery leading to a tube in his neck pumping painkillers for a week, and months of recovery. It was really devastating and put a huge strain on the company’s progression. Baum was so scared that he typed up an email to the biggest competitor saying he wanted to sell the business. But never hitting “send” was the best life decision Baum ever made. Sidenote: that competitor has since gone out of business.
After he recovered the business came back with a vengeance, forging new relationships and growing its social media. They moved into their first warehouse, a defunct bridal studio adorned with pink walls and love quotes. A glassblower was brought on board, allowing the opportunity to design and manufacture everything within the team instead of buying cheap imported glass. The collabs kept going and Daily High Club worked its way up, eventually leading the company to the backyard of the mellow lord and savior…Tommy Chong. They’ve since moved the whole crew to L.A., ready to take DHC to the next level!
