Joshua Kesselman, the man behind the RAW® brand of rolling papers and other smoking accessories, didn’t name his brand after a process. He named it after a feeling. A feeling of realness, energy, and truth. The word came to him “through the emotion in a classic hip-hop track’s lyrics; a raw expression of honesty and intensity that captured exactly what I wanted the brand to stand for… Papers are about how it feels when you light up with people you love.”
If you want to understand him, start at the beginning. A New York kid collects rolling papers and learns that a thin sheet can carry feeling. That spark leads to a factory in Spain, a million-dollar bet, and a few hip hop co-signs. That path sets the stage for the brand that would make his name.
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Sit with Josh Kesselman and it becomes clear: his drive isn’t money. It is a rare obsession with rolling papers, down to details most people skip past.
He collected them. Before he was a world-famous businessman in the rolling-paper industry, he was an eccentrically dressed guy with binders of more than 2,000 packs from around the world, trading with a handful of equally obsessed collectors. And this was before the internet.
So, where did this drive for rolling papers, smokeskins, rolls, wraps, sheets, roll-ups, leaves, rice-style papers, and more come from?
The shop that made him belong
“I remember my dad doing magic tricks with rolling papers,” Kesselman says of late-’70s family holiday parties. “He’d light one, throw it up in the air, and it would just vanish. Nothing came down. When you’re a little kid and you see that, you’re …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
