Have a CBD Xmas
Gift boxes of cannabisbased products are proving a surprise hit
Every Christmas, retailers scramble to identify the “hit” gift of the season, known in the retail sector as a “Buzz Lightyear”. A reference to the Toy Story doll that sold out rapidly and broke all sales records when it came out in 1996 (with parents paying hundreds on the black market to install this ubiquitous plastic jock under their Christmas tree), these products are the bestselling gifts of the season, destined to be giddily Instagrammed on Christmas morning and enthused over throughout January.
This year, all bets are on an entirely different sort of buzz: cannabidiol, or CBD, products. Over the past two years, the cannabis derivative (which, to be clear, contains no THC, the compound that gets users “high”) has shot from being a relatively niche hippyish product to outstripping sales of vitamin C and vitamin D combined. CBD has even been given the royal seal of approval: this month, the Duchess of Cornwall cheerily enthused about CBD oil on a visit to a farmers’ market in London.
“It’s primarily through word of mouth that CBD has evolved into such an in-demand supplement,” says Joe Oliver, founder of LDN CBD, London’s first walk-in CBD boutique in Camden. “There’s a CBD hand balm we sold to a builder with tendinitis in his hand, and months later, we still get a steady stream of construction workers coming in to ask for the same balm, because someone recommended it. And we get a lot of repeat customers buying multiple of a product that worked for them, to give to their friends and family.”
Although medical evidence is woefully thin on the ground, CBD has been touted as a treatment for conditions including chronic pain, epilepsy, menstrual cramps, insomnia and anxiety, and is commonly consumed orally in drops, capsules and gummies, or topically in balms and oils, all adding up to an overall market set to be worth almost £1 billion per year by 2025 in the UK alone.
Last Christmas, CBD was still a little too risky a gift for notoriously conservative Christmas shoppers. In 2018, CBD fans were still having to explain that yes, CBD is legal, and no, it won’t get you high. This made CBD a somewhat risky gift to place under the tree – a gamble compounded by the fact that CBD is no cheapo stocking filler. A good quality CBD oil, like Kloris’s 5% CBD drops, costs £46 for a 10ml bottle.
But 2019 was the year CBD stepped confidently into the mainstream,
It is an aspirational, celebrity-endorsed product... with a price tag to match
and – crucial criteria for hit-gift status – gift-givers can be confident that their nearest and dearest will know CBD to be an aspirational, glamorous, celebrity-endorsed product… with a price tag to match.
“It’s taken some time to debunk a lot of myths around CBD, but this Christmas customers are much more informed and the demand is definitely there,” says Johan Obel, founder of Thedrug. Store, a stylish CBD boutique in Marylebone that resembles a Space NK. Thedrug. Store has rolled out a series of Christmas “CBD selection boxes”, aimed at CBD devotees who want to introduce friends and family to its benefits.
“Here in the UK, we really had no grasp of how big the CBD market was until the Centre for Medicinal Cannabis commissioned an extensive marketsizing exercise,” says Shomi Malik, the centre’s development director. “We found out that it was far bigger than anyone had anticipated, with 1.3 million British consumers using CBD products, and a market that had doubled, year-on-year, for the past three years. Today the CBD market is estimated at £300 million.”
Not bad stats for a cannabis product that until very recently would have been regarded with suspicion. A couple of years ago, cannabis’s reputation was in the gutter; but in Christmas 2019, it takes pride of place under the tree.