PDX Green Box

‘These days young folks aren’t moving to Portland to retire’, as the worn out joke goes. More often than not, they’re moving to start something of their own: a new life, a new relationship, a new job, or possibly a new business in a place where the young, ambitious, and entrepreneurial-minded are thriving.

For recent Atlanta-transplant, Adrian Wayman, owner of Portland-based cannabis box subscription and courier service, Green Box, his reasons for putting down roots in Portland encompassed all of the above. Weed culture and the shifting attitudes toward legalizing marijuana motivated him to relocate too. “I got my medical card [when I moved to Oregon], and that’s when it became more than just getting high. I found out I was medicating and didn’t know it. Now I’m realizing I’m helping myself from anxiety, stress, and countless other things,” recalled Wayman.

Charmed by the City of Roses, feeling like he’d hit a professional plateau as an audio engineer in Atlanta, and “dying to get out of the South” after coming out as a gay man, Wayman, who is Black, initially moved to Portland in 2012. A love of weed, further solidified during his time as a budtender (like a barista, but for cannabis), and a desire to make the medicinal herb more accessible beyond the standard dispensary eventually led him to create, Green Box.

The first of its kind in Portland, Oregon, Green Box is a part of a recent trend in popular boxed-based subscription services. Becoming a Green Box club member is easy. It starts with filling out a personal profile. Then, subscribers can get get choosy with their subscription level.

The Essential Box includes three to six hand-selected items. The Premium Box is the next step up and allows for seven to ten personally selected products. Both the Essential Box and the Premium Box can be ordered as little as once a month or as much as three times a month. However, the pinnacle of Green Box grandeur is the Elite Box, a treasure trove of goodies from top-shelf cannabis flower to edibles, topicals, and vape pens and cartridges.

Boxes can include a mix of THC and CBD dominant products, or they can be made cannabinoid-specific, meaning an assortment of predominantly THC, or predominately CBD items. Each box comes with a description of what’s inside, which includes detailed product information so consumers can consume with confidence.

While it may seem like a luxury attainable to affluent Portlanders only, Wayman maintains, “Green Box is for everyone.” His regular Green Box clientele are people from all walks of life.Boxes range in price between $90 to $120 depending on the subscription level and delivery frequency, but all of the boxes are priced below the total retail value of everything included inside, making it a deal either way.

Green Box has humble origins. It takes its name from the unassuming green electrical boxes that dotted the streets in the residential neighborhood where Wayman grew up in suburban Atlanta. “My first time smoking weed was at the electrical green box,” he reminisced. “There would be weed inside and we just called it the ‘green box.’ So it’s like the smoke box…the hangout spot when you’re in the subdivision.”

Three years in, Wayman remains optimistic about Green Box’s future, and its potential to reach and to educate burgeoning segments–recreationally and medicinally–of the quickly growing cannabis market: “When it comes to cannabis…people go through a lot of trial and error just to feel good, so if I can help you…let’s do it!”