There’s no one who sees the world quite like Sharoz Makarechi, but many more can learn from her example. Describing herself as a humanist to the core, the creative entrepreneur, writer, curator, producer, activist developed her company Plaid America to generate social change and propel racial equity. Through its umbrella of brands, including Substance USA and Skewville, Makarechi is following the North Star of justice and truth that empowers her to tread where few dare to go. In an era fraught with divisiveness, she finds a way to create healing conversations that reach people’s hearts - and she is unafraid to tell it like it is.
“I love this fucking country,” the visionary says of the United States. “It gave me the opportunity to become who I am. And when you love something so much, you can criticize it.”
What Is Sharoz Makarechi's Substance? A Cannabis Brand Helping Incarcerated Citizens
When Makarechi criticizes, she does so with compassion and insight. Her goal in creating Substance, a groundbreaking cannabis brand based in California, is to raise awareness of the huge disparities in the American carceral system. For each 12-pack of premium pre-rolls that Substance sells, $8.46 is committed to organizations that work to end mass incarceration and recidivism. (The per-pack donation is a nod to the length of time that former police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck in 2020.) Substance’s primary beneficiary is Impact/Justice @impactjustice, a nonprofit that leverages research to take action on criminal justice reform, improve conditions and opportunities for incarcerated people, and support successful reentry.
“We live in the land of the free, but we have more people behind bars than anywhere else in the world. ” Makarechi notes.
Sharoz Makarechi: From Iran To Immigration, Arts And Advocacy
The Substance founder’s roots in humanitarian activism reach far back into her childhood, a perspective informed by international experiences and steeped in a mix of gratitude for individual expression while also navigating feelings of being an outsider.
Born in Iran, she grew up witnessing that nation’s descent into chaos, violence and gender apartheid after the Islamic revolution. Though her family was Muslim, her parents held largely secular views and her father, an engineer, emphasized science and academics over religious practices.
As an extremist regime came to power in Iran, Makarechi observed what she calls “corrupt, murderous clerics hiding behind Islam, who now happen to be the funding source behind Hamas, Hezbollah, and other self serving militant groups” transforming a modern progressive Iran with ancient cultural roots into a restrictive nightmare for anyone who didn’t fit the profile of a “pious man.”
Makarechi’s father, Ahmad, died in a car crash during the transition that led to the renaming of her country from Iran to the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). “I watched him die in real time in part due to the chaos and discrimination against us for not appearing Muslim-enough,” she remembers.
The swiftness with which fundamentalism and indiscriminate power turned people violent and inhumane against each other, has made her “a pacifist to the nth degree.”, she says. “My way into any situation starts with figuring out what’s best for the common good—how do we protect, improve or positively impact individual lives without compromising values or society as a whole?”
The young woman immigrated to the United States with her mother, Maryam, soon after experiencing the fatal crash that claimed her dad. Scared but curious, she embraced her new home with an everlasting commitment to respect people’s diverse identities. Yet she noted that the West also had its own inequity issues.
Citing influences including James Baldwin, Isabel Wilkerson, Toni Morrison, Dave Chappelle, James Kerry Marshall, Keith Haring, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Bryan Stevenson, Killer Mike, and Dolly Parton, the artist seeks to forge pathways and develop solutions that give marginalized people true equity. She asserts, “You can’t hide who you are when you look like me… I immigrated to Maryland during a time when there was a lot of anti-Middle Eastern sentiment. I was ostracized, made to feel unwelcome but I didn’t have a home country to go back to, and I still don’t… I am a witness, and an outsider. Still, there is so much that’s beautiful about what America represents. Despite major blemishes in our collective history, we have so much to celebrate, culturally. And there is no American culture without Black culture.”
Makarechi continues, “Everybody who lives in the U.S. who is not Black has a responsibility to everybody who is – a responsibility to acknowledge truths and support reparations. I framed [one of my company’s ethos statements] as Reparations Through Cannabis in part because the term Reparations by itself seems too broad and impenetrable for some. Add a preposition and make it specific to Cannabis and it’s hard to argue with. That’s where the thinking behind Substance’s mission to help end mass incarceration comes from—don’t take it from me, read Michelle Alexander’s seminal book on the topic. The New Jim Crow’s proven thesis is that our prison industrial complex is in effect an extension of slavery.”
Watch Substance x Skewville's collaboration on Times Square billboards in New York City:
What Makes Substance A Powerful Cannabis Brand For Social Change?
Soon Makarechi would merge advocacy with her passion for art and design to create globally-lauded, changeworthy brands, campaigns, and projects. Connecting the dots to the harm that the War on Drugs has caused communities of color, she determined that cannabis could be a uniting factor in spotlighting and repairing some of the damage. Substance, the first in a “house of benevolent brands,” maximizes every opportunity for consumer impact. Its eye-catching packaging educates consumers while delivering premium personal size pre-rolls in a signature 12-pack.
“This is my contribution to normalization,” she states of Substance’s mini pre-rolls. “I want to see more people holding a joint [casually in public] the way they would a glass of wine or a pint of beer.”
The original art on Substance packs are watercolors by Sinclair Chase-Korte, representing the artist’s own hand, in three key gestures, a rising fist, a peace sign, and waving Star Trek’s “Live Long and Prosper” salute. Makarechi worked with Sinclair, commissioning the art with intention in June 2020. Shortlisted for a 2023 Clio Cannabis Award, the Substance packaging has embedded itself in the minds of the cannabis community.
Check out highlights from Substance's win at the Women's Cannabis Awards (slide for video of Makarechi's moment with Erykah Badu!):
This spring, Substance won Best THC Pre-roll at the Women’s Cannabis Awards in Los Angeles, where renowned musical artist Erykah Badu presented the evening’s final award. “She was as cool, kind and present, as you might imagine,” Makarechi recalls. “My friends in the community captured the exchange where I told her my pre-rolls were in competition and she coos over my packs. She called them cute. My pal [actress and producer] Ifé Moore can be heard [on the video] telling me to give her the packs. Shout out to [cultivator and brand educator] Roger Sterling AKA Ganja Guru @ganjaguru2 and [spiritual advisor and content creator] Lila @lilawestcoast for capturing from two angles, otherwise I still might not believe it.” Fun fact, Badu said that an Indica-leaning strain felt right for the night, unintentionally predicting that 45 minutes later Substance’s Garlic Cocktail 12-pack (flowered by @thcdesign) would be revealed as the top prize winner.
Sharoz Makarechi And CODE41 Create Unify Watches With Substance And Equity Flag
More recently, Makarechi collaborated with the luxury watch brand CODE41 to launch the limited-edition UNIFY series of mechanical watches bearing key art from Substance and the Equity Flag, another of her projects that calls for celebration of our differences and peaceful coexistence. A portion of proceeds from the first watch in the Swiss company’s UNIFY collection, emblazoned with Sinclair’s fist signifying the defense of human rights, will be donated to the Equal Justice Initiative nonprofit.
Watch Equity Flag on Times Square billboards:
What Is Sharoz Makarechi's Equity Flag?
The Equity Flag watches will be part of UNIFY’s permanent collection and support distribution of flags to be flown at schools and flag pins to like-minded politicians and fellow humanists. Back in January of this year, New Yorkers saw the Equity Flag, a rainbow spectrum of skin colors, flying high on Times Square billboards. To Makarechi, it is a beacon for what she wants all people to recognize: that regardless of our race, culture, or beliefs, we all share the same human experience and we must stand as one. Her manifesto on togetherness and the importance of the Equity Flag, which can be ordered as stickers, or pins, can be read at equityflag.com.
Substance x Skewville Bring New York Artistry To California Cannabis
That Times Square launch also provided an introduction to Skewville, a brand that the entrepreneur formed in partnership with the New York City-based artists of the same name. Bringing a distinctive graphic cool to the cannabis mission, Skewville packs offer a different kind of twist on Substance’s pre-roll initiative. A perfect combination of East Coast design and West Coast ingenuity, these boxes feature the art style made famous by twins Adam (“Ad deVille”) and Andrew (“Droo”) Torio, all primary colors and poppy street-chic lines. In a joyful play on expectations, the main symbol could be mistaken for a joint at first glance but it’s actually a pencil. $2 donations from the Skewville packs specifically benefit the Justice Arts Coalition, which works to stock prisons with art supplies and runs art programs in carceral institutions so that inmates have more creative outlets.
For Makarechi, Skewville evokes memories of the place she’s lived the longest and remembers most fondly. She met Ad deVille when they were both students at New York’s School of Visual Arts (Droo went to FIT). Soon after graduation, the twins moved into a building with a slanted structure and set up a creative bong-making factory - hence the brand name. The brothers’ experiments in art making also expanded the limits of street art from paint on walls to placing sneaker cutouts overhead onto utility lines in conversation with all the other sneakers thrown with symbolic or turf-marking intention. What started in Queens, their place of birth, has gained immense popularity worldwide, especially in street art circles.
“Adam was the first person to get me high,” Makarechi recalls. “So even though [my brands] launched in California, it all started in New York. And Skewville is certainly New York’s own, which was the message of the billboard.”
Today Skewville is based in Bushwick, producing pop-art bongs, grinders, and other cannabis-related accessories to help normalize and modernize plant culture. Makarechi lovingly refers to Skewville as a “New York legacy brand of arts and advocacy.” Though the Substance and Skewville packs are currently only available in California, their inventor anticipates seeing her brands eventually resonate in the Empire State via every possible avenue.
“New York is all about diversity, legacy, people making art and smoking artfully,” she observes. “Skewville is as New York as they come. The billboards were our hello, to say we’re here in spirit for now, and we can’t wait to be on all the shelves soon.”
What's Next For Sharoz Makarechi?
Despite her various projects operating separately on occasion, Sharoz is excited to talk about them all in one breath, because the arc of their moral universe bends toward her vision of justice.
“This 12-pack format is really a canvas for collaboration. Each little box connecting an artist, a cultivar, and a beneficiary—bringing this product to market is a way to demonstrate compassionate capitalism,” Makarechi declares. “Money doesn’t motivate me, but there is definitely money to be made with the Plaid America model, even with extreme donations and a commitment to our ethos. Over the past couple years, we’ve been able to reduce our COGs, button up our SOPs, and offer better wholesale pricing to retailers without compromising quality.
If this is what we can accomplish in a couple years as an independent, purpose-driven brand, imagine what a capitalized version could be—globally.
She concludes with a final clarion call of unity: “I want people to remember that we all need each other and that the intersection of our differences is where our strength lies.”
It’s easy for Sharoz Makarechi to describe herself as an outsider, but perhaps it takes the ultimate “participant-observer” experience for someone to truly understand what can connect the world. Now that’s an art.
For more on Substance x Skewville, visit californiasubstance.com or follow @substance_usa on Instagram. For more on Equity Flag, visit equityflag.com or follow @equityflag and @sharozzie on Instagram.
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Featured image: Sharoz Makarechi, founder of Plaid America (Substance x Skewville) and creator of Equity Flag (C) Plaid America
