After years of flat revenues, the iconic rolling papers company has plans to invigorate its brand.

Any devotee of cannabis who was around in the 1960s, ’70s and beyond remembers smoking marijuana via hand-rolled joints. The secret to a well-rolled doobie? A great rolling paper – like Zig-Zag.

You know, those colorful little packets sold in head shops which bear the instantly recognizable image of a bearded guy wearing a Tunisian chechia hat and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. “I remember seeing the orange little packages, and my first experience was Zig-Zag papers,” says Lorenzo De Plano, who, with Eric Anwar, was hired two years ago by their parent company Turning Point Brands to revitalize the Zig-Zag brand.

The two entrepreneurs have moved toward that goal in multiple ways, with their next project — an online entertainment “hub” seemingly unrelated to rolling papers — set to debut December 1. The hub aims to appeal to young Zig-Zag consumers, with live online concerts, podcasts and video profiles of artists.

The two men are themselves young: De Plano, 27, is Zig-Zag’s vice president of new ventures; and Anwar,29, is director of marketing. So their targeted outreach seems a natural fit.

“Our thesis,” De Plano says, “was that a lot of people can tell you what their first experience with a beer brand is, or the first time they used a makeup brand, the first time they opened a video game console… so we said to ourselves, ‘You have this evolving landscape of [young] adult consumers, this proliferation of cannabis legalization across the country. We want to be the first experience for all these adult consumers.’”

That was also the mission of Zig-Zag’s parent organization, Turning Point Brands, a public company, when it recruited the duo, who had previously co-founded Solace Technologies, a developer of liquid brands for vaping. In moving to Zig-Zag, the two encountered a brand that had long been what De Plano calls a “cash cow” for Turning Point but more recently was in stagnation. “Revenues on this brand were pretty flat a long time,” the VP acknowledges.

To change that, De Plano and Anwar began to plan, but then the pandemic hit, and cannabis users quarantining with their children reportedly shied away from smoking in their homes, in favor of vape pens and gummies. De Plano, however, knocks down any suggestion that the newer forms of consumption pushed traditional rolling papers – long a staple for tobacco – to the periphery of the cannabis world.

Instead, De Plano prefers the term “poly-usage.” “There are people definitely migrating towards vapes,” he says, “but there are also people that once in a while want to consume combustible products because they just like the experience.”

What he emphasizes here are the newcomers to the rolling-papers market. “The challenge that we faced was, a lot of these new brands were coming into the market. OCB and RAW were competitors that started investing heavily into their brand,” De Plano explains. “We said to ourselves, ‘We have to make sure that we not only maintain our share but grow our share.’”

One move toward that goal was to revamp Zig-Zag’s informational website with vibrant colors and stories like the brand’s origins in France (who knew?) 142 years ago. The idea for the eventual Zig-Zag product had come even earlier from one of the North African soldiers called Zouaves fighting on the side of the French in the Crimean War.

Eric Anwar (left) and Lorenzo De Plano are the young entrepreneurs Turning Point Brands hired to ... [+] reinvigorate its Zig-Zag brand.

Clay pipes were the way soldiers smoked tobacco back then until, as the company’s website tells it, one Zouave in particular lifted a pipe to his mouth just as a Russian bullet smashed through it. The soldier, still alive, calmly tore off a piece of paper from either his gunpowder bag or musket cartridge (depending on the version of the story) and rolled a cigarette.

The company was subsequently established near Paris in 1879 and over the years introduced multiple rolling-paper renovations before being sold in the 1950s to another French company and in 2000 to an American one. Along the way, the Zoave “Zig-Zag man” image became a cultural marker, with references by, among others, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and, more recently Snoop, Cypress Hill and Dr. Dre.

The new website De Plano and Anwar designed did more than more than describe the brand’s history; it also moved Zig-Zag online to sell directly to customers. The two next launched eBay and B2B accounts to service wholesale accounts. “We made it very easy for stores to purchase directly from us,” taking sales reps out of the picture, Anwar says. Zig-Zag papers are distributed through 220,000 c-stores and bodegas, Anwar says. What he calls an “entire ecosystem” added dispensaries.

Then Covid hit, of course, but, the marketing director says,  “We actually saw a significant increase in sales during the pandemic.” Buying behaviors changed; cannabis sales spiked; and Zig-Zag’s new system was there in place to send its products direct to people’s doorsteps. The two entrepreneurs reached further into twentysomething territory by partnering their brand with the environmental group One Tree Planted.

The newest move Anwar and De Plano will initiate on December 1 is Zig-Zag Studio, a media hub the two men hope will draw in the younger set, who are looking at the cannabis experience in ways different from their parents. Included in the hub, says Anwar, will be a native video series, podcasts, limited-edition apparel and collaborations. “Eventually we’ll get into concerts and, down the line, music festivals,” Anwar he says.

Right now, plans call for a video series, accessible from Zig-Zag’s website, of live performances by musicians from diverse genres, notably artists with significant online followings to boost the website’s ratings. Concerts will be staged in the California woods. Another video series, “Through My Lens,”  will profile creators like a photographer, a painter and a digital artist. “The idea is for our brand to live in the culture in which people love music and creativity,” Anwar says.

Certainly that doesn’t seem to have much to do with rolling papers and cannabis, but De Plano explains, a tad surprisingly, “We don’t want to tie ourselves to cannabis.” Rather, “We feel that nowadays advertising is often abrasive; it’s a lot of noise.

“Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter,” the VP continues. “So what we really said is, ‘Let’s make some content so the brand isn’t completely in your face; through watching that content, you’re seeing that brand [name] in the background, [but] it’s not so abrasive that you’re fed a stream of advertisements.

“We think that’s what the new generation of consumers wants.”