Blanca Empresa

In 2018, Canadian greenhouse space was priced like Canadian real estate, and it was showing up in the cost per gram. Those rent costs were a huge capex for new cannabis companies that would only go up from there. Our client’s answer was to grow in Colombia instead — twelve hours of daylight year-round, no snow, a government export quota — extract the oil to European pharmaceutical standards, and sell it into Germany, where demand was outrunning supply by a distance.

They arrived with a thesis, two founders and nothing else. No name. No brand. No deck. An opportunity to start from scratch.

The difficulty was that the cannabis industry in 2018 still looked like cannabis. Green, leafy, a bit stoned. The modern brands we see today were only coming into the market. This company was asking serious people for serious money to build pharmaceutical-grade infrastructure in a country most investors still associated with something else entirely, and we were up to the challenge.

Plum, seafoam, and acid green was the direction we went with. Not one leaf. In 2018 most decks in the category were either clinical blue to stay away from cannabis, or leaning into it with Cheech and Chong green. A company asking for pharmaceutical-grade capital cannot look like a dispensary, so photography styling was macro and duotone — the plant as botany, closer to a lab slide than a lifestyle shot.

After breaking down the intent, meeting with the team and forming a strategy, we chose the name Blanca. Spanish for white, the name linked to their business model of white-label production. Custom typography was created inspired by the flow pathway of oil, turning the open counters and apertures (the c and the n) in the wordmark into oil droplets, so the main product being sold sits inside the name.

A name, identity, website, business plan, an investor memorandum, and a Q4 2018 investor presentation carrying a strong team and story. We made a verifiable series of documents ready for institutional investors, not a brochure.

The best story within the company was the easiest one to tell: $1.25–$2.25 against $0.22, with nothing else on the slide. When the argument is that strong, the job of design is to get out of its way.

What is not here is the money. The financials, the valuation and the use of proceeds stay where they belong, and so do the founders’ phone numbers.

Blanca was acquired in 2020. Two years from a thesis and two founders to a company somebody wanted to own. We named it and built the case for it. What happened after that is theirs.