Thanks for the compliment, it really makes me happy that you’re enjoying the genetics because that’s the whole point.
Well, to say it bluntly, there is no pricing strategy, this is me just freestyling the whole way through as I don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t have investors and I do 90% of the work myself. As I get more customers, I lower prices because there is more support behind me, it’s plain and simple.
I make no apologies for working on lowering the prices because I’m hardly finished doing it.
The only reason I’m not charging the high seed prices that other people are charging is because I’m not greedy and I have very different goals in doing this than just making money, I want to Haze the world.
I started out with a few dozen customers (mostly my friends who had known me for years) and it has grown incredibly over the years to now over 13,000 growers in all 50 states and 23 countries, but it sure didn’t start off that way.
The people who were lucky enough to get in on the initial drops of Original Haze, NL#5, Original Skunk #1, NL#2 and NL#5, were in the first few hundred growers because growth started slow. At the beginning this was a very expensive endeavor that put me in debt for a year-plus before I ever sold a single seed. I started with no marketing and was simply growing through word-of-mouth.
Since before I started selling seeds, I always wanted to work to get the prices down, and I’ve been doing it every chance I get. I started at $10 and $20 (granted, the $20 seeds were literally 23 years old at the time and from Mel Frank) and then I went down to $5.00 and $3.33 and now $2.00 when I can, which depends on the quantity I have on hand. I will never sell seeds at some of the ridiculous high prices that I see other people selling seeds for. I don’t like the way other people have been doing business in the seed industry and I still don’t.
My goal is to make cultivating high quality cannabis more affordable to everybody who wants to do it. My overall goal is to get seed prices down to a dollar a pack for 10 seeds, yes, just $.10 a seed, but I have a long way to go and I would need a lot of growers behind me to be able to pull that off.
The more growers I get behind me, the lower the prices are going to go.
That said, I still believe that getting 10 seeds for $100 and then being able to sex and select your favorite female and grow her for the rest of your life is a bargain by any measure.
If you know what you’re doing, you can keep a plant going for more than a couple decades as I have done with OG Kush. I was given the cutting in November 2004 after I got out of prison and I’m smoking some of it as I write this. Every pack of seeds you get can be an investment that benefits you for the rest of your life if you know how to handle it.
I think the whole community is fortunate that I was able to get these authentic genetics directly from Skunkman Sam, Mel Frank, and Seattle Greg, and I’m doing my best to get them into the community so that growers like us on Overgrow, will have these genetics in-hand before the cannabis companies come along in droves and try to patent them as some jerk-off recently did in Oregon with original Haze using less than 10 seeds (Google it).
My whole goal is to keep what I call, “The Primary Colors of Cannabis" in public domain so that generations from now, growers can still be growing the building blocks of modern cannabis and reimagining the hybrids of cannabis that we currently have now. Instead of selecting for speed of flowering and yield of flower, let’s select for highest quality, regardless of the flowering time so we can really have some connoisseur quality cannabis in the community instead of all mostly mids that finish flowering in under 10 weeks.
As for why I don’t spend more of my time posting about individual plants is because I’m so damn busy getting seeds to people and giving them the opportunity to discover what they do on their own, which is way more valuable than me saying what I have and people not believing it, which is what happened with original Haze. I had people who had never touched any of the seeds that I’d ever grown, telling other people that I don’t have original Haze, which was absolute BS, and the community also knows that now because they have had the opportunity to grow original Haze from me themselves.
The same thing happened with Original Skunk #1 when I reproduced the seeds from Mel Frank that were 23 years old at that point and only reproduced in 1996, after Mel Frank got them in 1988 from Skunkman. They still smelled acrid to me and I reported on it when I released them in 2020, and a lot of people didn’t believe me, but it’s been my best selling variety since I released it because now we all know that it still makes thiols.
The community now knows (since 2001) what a thiol is and not only does those old Afghan-leaning Skunk #1 seeds make thiols, so does the Purest Indica and the Northern Lights #2 that I got from Seattle Greg. He said those seeds went into his sister’s freezer before he met Nevil which dates it sometime no later than 1983, and anybody who has grown Purest Indica will tell you that they look Neanderthal in comparison to modern cannabis, they are leafy, thick and finish flowering extremely fast and when you break up the buds, your fingers literally smell like old-school hashish because of the thiols and terpenes combined.
I’m not trying to stand on a soap box getting people to listen to me anymore, I let the genetics do the talking and word-of-mouth gets around, and if they weren’t what they are, which is amazing, I wouldn’t be so busy dealing seeds to growers in all 50 states and then some.
I’m really glad that you are enjoying the genetics because that is the whole point. But to see you say that you received eight packs of seeds for around $500 from me, which is 80 seeds that cost average just $6.25 each, I think you would be saying thank you instead of expecting more. You’re getting the highest quality genetics for an incredible price. If you realized how much work this is and how expensive this is to do for the community, you would be willing to pay three times as much to get those genetics that I’ve given them to you for. In order to get just the original Haze genetics from Skunkman, I had to fly half-way around the world and smuggle the seeds home at the cost of thousands of dollars. I turned it around so that growers are now able to get the same genetics delevered to their door for fifty or a hundred dollars.
The genetics that you got are gold and you got them for a very small amount of money.
I sat in prison for five years for growing flowers in my backyard and because I would not cooperate against my friends, and I swore to myself as I sat there that when I got out of prison, I would be the Johnny Appleseed of cannabis seeds.
Much love to you and yours…
