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Going public is a common goal for many company founders, and RAW‘s founder Josh Kesselman is no exception. He told Green Market Report at the CWCB Expo in New York, where RAW was a sponsor, that he’d “love to” find a way – but the path would have to fit his vision.

Attired in a sparkling blazer, diamond-encrusted watch, and $900 Balenciaga sneakers, the paper impresario waxed poetic about selling shares to his customer base to create a “community.”

IPO talk

Going public “is something we would love to do,” Kesselman told GMR. “It just has to be done in our way.

“It isn’t something we’re just going to go to market and do the usual path. It’s got to be done in some way that really truly creates the kind of thing that I’m envisioning, which is more of a legacy,” he added.

During a session at the CWCB Expo, Kesselman told Tim Seymour of CNBC, “My dream would be to bring the company public in a way that only our fans – like our consumers, our smokers – can invest with us. That way it’s more of … a RAW community.”

In this dream, shares would be available via a QR code inside packs of RAW paper. “For every one you scan, you’re allowed to buy a share,” Kesselman said. “That way I can keep certain sharks out.”

For now, the vision will remain a dream, however, as there is no way to control who buys stock in a public company.

“I don’t know how we’re going to pull it off, but I really want to pull it off in a way that, 10 years from now, we brought our base in with us,” he said. “There’s got to be a way, man. There’s got to be some way.”

Seymour also asked if a deal with a large consumer packaged goods company, such as Procter & Gamble, would be considered, but Kesselman said he isn’t interested in going corporate. Even a company that has vast experience with paper products isn’t the path he wants to go down.

“I want to bring my people in. Imagine if you ran a publicly traded company where all of your shareholders were your fans who consumed your product. Imagine what that would be like,” he said.

Pre-rolls

While rolling papers cater to the audience that wants to roll their own, pre-rolls are a fast-growing category that attracts those who don’t know how to roll a joint or aren’t any good at it.  Kesselman acknowledged this trend and said he is pursuing pre-roll brands to use RAW papers and put the company’s logo on the product packaging.

“My goal would be to license RAW to people who are making really good pre-rolls in a way that they have to make it in a certain way using the certain paper, certain machines, grinders, devices, so that it’s a perfect, or what I consider to be a perfect, joint for the end user,” he said. “I prefer to license it to smaller outfits than larger ones because that way it’s more like what we already do.”

Kesselman clearly loves his product and his company. He said he began a rolling paper collection in youth, and while he is currently rebuilding it after losing the collection, he is passionate about papers.

The post Could a RAW IPO roll up to the markets? appeared first on Green Market Report.

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Debra Borchardt, KahliBuds, 420GrowLife