Aiming High

With growing investor interest, cannabis startups in India hope to become part of a global boom where industrial hemp is used in sectors ranging from medicines to textiles

- NAANDIKA TRIPATHI

After eight years of being a voice for hemp in India, Elston Menezes, 31, one of the founders of BE Hemp, decided to shut shop in 2020 before the pandemic.

The enterprise had started out by educating people about cannabis and hemp, before selling accessories and dreamcatchers made from hemp, in order to develop a brand of basic hemp t-shirts with the returns. The founders had bigger plans, but slow and limited market growth and tiny returns made it difficult to sustain.

“The moment we decided to close for good, the pandemic hit, and there were no jobs available. What we thought was just fate being cruel to us was actually life’s way of saying our mission was not done yet, and within the first week of lockdown, we received calls from our friends and customers asking for our hemp rolling paper,” recalls Menezes.

What started with two or three people calling daily to get rolling papers for their friends, snowballed into hundreds of people ordering daily, to the point where the startup ran out of their own rolling paper and had to resort to buying stock from other brands.

“We were the only people delivering rolling paper pan-India during the lockdown. Our popularity grew over the course of three months, leading us to build our website, and we decided to contact other hemp companies in India to help them gain traction during the pandemic as well,” he adds. The startup now has nearly 20 hemp vendors on its platform.