How to Go Legit and Make Your Mark in Weed
The Legal Canadian cannabis industry has always suffered from an identity crisis that goes hand-in-hand with a lack of brand loyalty. Experts, laymen, financiers, and everyone in between have shouted their opinions on why this is happening, including tight regulations on advertising, little-to-know imagination on marketing, but also a lot of unnecessary pandering to the same people.
“Most cannabis companies spend far too much time trying to be part of building a movement in the community,” says Dylan King, Founder and CEO of Pistol and Paris. “My focus is different. This isn’t about romanticizing the plant or the culture, it’s about building a company that people want to work at, that scales, and wins on dollars and cents and ultimately survives.
It’s a perspective shaped long before legalization.
The moment that defined the brand’s direction came shortly after King launched. The Ontario Cannabis Store had published what it was looking for in new product submissions, including one particularly telling priority: legacy growers transitioning into the legal market bringing their cannabis to market.
The goal was clear. Regulators hoped trusted growers or brands from the legacy world could help bring consumers into the regulated system.
“It made sense,” King says. “If consumers knew the same culture and people they respected were now producing legal products, it would give them confidence they could still buy great weed.”
For King, it confirmed something he had already suspected, that the legal market had lost some of the authenticity that built the industry in the first place. That realization pushed him to lean fully into the concept that would eventually define the brand: Legacy to Legal.
A Nod to the Culture
King didn’t just talk about the transition from legacy to legal. He built the brand around it.
One of the most recognizable elements of Pistol and Paris marketing features King’s helicopter. On the west coast, helicopters and hockey bags carry a very specific cultural meaning for people who were part of the legacy cannabis trade.
“It was a nod to the culture that helped build this industry,” he says.
Those visuals immediately resonated with people who understood the reference. At the same time, they introduced something the legal market hadn’t seen before: marketing that openly acknowledged the industry’s roots rather than trying to distance itself from them.
“At the time nothing like that existed in the legal market,” King says. “I saw the gap and decided to fill it.”
Before cannabis became a regulated industry, success in the legacy market required something different than passion alone, it required discipline.
“You had to understand risk,” King says. “You had to understand how to run a business.” Reputation carried real weight and agreements were built on trust rather than NDAs or legal teams. “A handshake and eye contact still meant something,” he says. “Your word was your bond.”
Many of the growers Pistol and Paris work with today come from that same background. Some have spent more than two decades cultivating cannabis that has earned global recognition simply because it was consistently exceptional. That experience still shapes how the company operates today.
What the Legal Market Got Wrong
Since legalization, King believes two major issues have separated the companies that survive from those that struggle. The first is a simple one, Many people operated in the legacy space, some were very successful and others less so. In the legal market, you have to run things like a real business because it is one, and it operates very differently from the legacy side.
“At the end of the day it has to be about revenue, profit, and building a team that can sustain itself,” he says. Instead, some companies spent enormous energy chasing visibility. “They go to every trade show looking for support and talking about the people and the plant,” he says. “But the fundamentals matter more.”
King says, it’s like the line from the film Blow when he watches the industry. “You have the wrong dream.”
For him, the dream is straightforward: build a profitable company, stay disciplined, and scale when the time is right.
The second issue was the wave of outside capital that flooded the industry in its early years. Large licensed producers raised massive amounts of money and spent heavily building facilities and expanding executive teams. In many cases, those investments lacked financial discipline.
“Companies spent tens or hundreds of millions building massive facilities,” King says. “A lot of it had very little connection to real return on investment.” Many of those companies have since disappeared or been sold for fractions of their original valuations.
Pistol and Paris took the opposite approach. “We are owner-financed,” King says. “There is no outside money.”
Operating without outside capital forces a different mindset. “Every dollar matters. Every expense gets questioned. Every investment needs to make sense.” When it is your own money and risk on the line, discipline becomes unavoidable.
Today the company combines that discipline with a cultivation model rooted in legacy craft and small batch growing remains central to the philosophy. In King’s view, smaller grow rooms consistently produce better cannabis because the environment is easier to control and every plant receives individual attention.
“Our flower is hand trimmed and cold cured,” he says. “There is attention to detail at every stage.” Many of the growers Pistol and Paris works with have spent more than 20 years refining their craft and that experience shows in the product.
When customers pick up the brand in stores, King wants the message to be clear. “We are a legacy brand with over 25 years of growing BC Bud,” he says. “And now we operate proudly in the legal market.”
The goal is simple: deliver premium cannabis that reminds people of the quality they remember from the legacy days, but produced within the safety and testing standards of the regulated system.
Five years after releasing its first SKU, Pistol and Paris has grown from a small founding team into a company employing more than 55 people. For King, the ambition goes beyond building a successful brand.
He wants the company to be recognized as one of the most respected cannabis brands in Canada, not only for the quality of its products but for the culture behind it.
Just as important is the environment inside the company itself. “I want us to be known as a great company to work for,” he says. “Building a strong culture and treating our staff like family matters just as much as the product.”
The same philosophy extends to the community around the company’s operations in Agassiz, British Columbia. Supporting smaller towns by creating real jobs and opportunities is something King considers part of the company’s responsibility as it grows.
For him, the mission remains straightforward. Build a company with strong roots, build a team people are proud to be part of, and prove that the discipline of the legacy market still has a place in the legal one.
