How Quality Meats Created a Brand and Became Their Own Client

The story behind low-THC beverage Herb Light

We’ve spent our whole careers making advertising for our clients’ brands. We helped them figure out how to look and how to talk and how to get people to care about them. We even made new brands for our clients and their brands. And we still do that. But we always thought, man, wouldn’t it be kinda cool if we made a brand and we were our own client, and then we made fun advertising things for our client, which was us?

And that’s how Herb Light came about. But it really started with an idea we had for a thing we wanted that didn’t exist.

See, we both really like the taste of beer and have a physical necessity to always have a can in our hands when out socially and repeatedly pour said can into our respective faces. But one of us (Gordy) was starting to not like the after-effects of alcohol. So, he started to re-dabble in cannabis to take the proverbial edge off.

But he was kind of a light weight, and every cannabis beverage out there was either way too high in dosage or had a fruity or botanical seltzer-y taste. It’s a confusing category with lots of unfamiliar brands and an unfamiliarity of how it all impacts your body and mind.

What we’re all familiar with is how light beer affects us. So, we decided to make a THC equivalent.

A light beer with the same crisp, crushable taste and the ritual of cracking open one after another over the course of an afternoon barbecue. Only replacing the light alcohol buzz part with a super-low dose cannabis buzz.

Basically using what we all know and love about light beer and our deep well of nostalgia around it as a mental shortcut, only with a THC twist.

And that’s where the Herb Light universe comes in. A brand idea baked into the product, name, packaging, lager-like taste. The absurd idea that this beverage, which could only physically exist right now, was around during the heyday of light beer. Herb Light genuinely believes it exists in the 1980s, and that’s its creative north star.

We used the power of our agency to pump out brand-building advertising most start-up brands don’t have the money or time for, complete with fictional history, old taglines, and an entire “Low-High Hills” mythology. We filled our social feed with 40-year-old photos of friends and family with Herb Light cans magically in their hands. And ’80s-style commercials bringing pain points around alcohol or cannabis anxiety to life with an absurd AI twist (demonic woodpeckers, giant 8-bit giraffes and weirdo panic goblins). We even partnered with former athletes to feature their younger 1980s selves hawking beer-styled novelty merchandise.

These are the kind of bold ideas with pointy POVs and distinct, memorable executions that we’ve always pitched to clients. Except now the client is us. And we don’t just have to approve the marketing, but also the distribution strategy and manufacturing and pricing and regulations and lots of other things that we don’t know about yet that go with building a new brand out of absolutely nothing.

Herb Light is now in 40+ locations of Binny’s, Chicago’s largest liquor retail store. And as we keep building it, the thing we’re most excited about is that we’re not searching for the brand.

We knew exactly who Herbert was before the first can ever existed. Now we get to keep figuring out what he does next.

Related: THC Beverage Herb Light Wants Your ‘Cannabis Horror Stories’ for Halloween