Anja Charbonneau grew up in British Columbia, moved to Portland, Oregon, and spent four years as creative director of Kinfolk — art-directing the quarterly lifestyle magazine that was selling 75,000 copies into over a hundred countries. She left in 2016 convinced she would never make a magazine of her own. The logistics were too hard. The business was too uncertain. Then her husband, who worked in Oregon’s booming cannabis industry, nudged her: wouldn’t it be great to make a weed magazine? The ones in shops still looked like relics of a previous era — or they were industry-focused trade journals, inaccessible to the creative women who actually used cannabis as part of their daily lives. In 2017, Charbonneau launched Broccoli — the name is slang for marijuana — as a free magazine distributed at dispensaries and design boutiques.
The first issue sold out immediately. Within two years, the all-women team was shipping to over forty countries, publishing three issues a year, and running In Bloom, a Portland cannabis festival featuring art, workshops, and music. The aesthetic owed something to Kinfolk’s precision but broke far more rules: psychedelic imagery, distorted type, spiralling text you had to rotate the magazine to read, all balanced against clean design and lush photography. Charbonneau wanted it beautiful and weird, a phrase she repeated in interviews like a mission statement. The content ranged from Korean smoke-wear designers to Japanese ambient composers to Bob Marley’s granddaughter to a recurring series profiling the women leading Portland’s cannabis scene.
Over twenty issues, Broccoli grew into a media company: books (A Weed Is a Flower, the Snail World series with artists Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland), a podcast, an industry newsletter called The Broccoli Report, and a Berlin hub. Issue 20 was the last. Charbonneau wrote that after many fruitful seasons sprouting editorial seeds into glorious, heady, story-filled gardens, it was time for the final harvest. The team has since launched Mushroom People and Catnip — new publications applying the same sensibility to different subcultures. The empire Charbonneau built from a free magazine handed out at dispensaries turned out to be bigger than cannabis. It was about community, design, and the conviction that every subculture deserves media as thoughtful as its best members.
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