1. Keep a Finger on the Pulse: Matt believes that to be a successful E-Commerce company, you must keep a finger on the pulse of the market and be quick to adopt trends with strong commercial potential.
2. Focus on Creative Marketing: Matt’s marketing strategy focuses on creating immersive, lifestyle-driven experiences that introduce smoke products in memorable ways—turning curiosity into excitement by offering unique, high-value interactions that resonate deeply with the target audience.
3. Be Flexible: Changing views on cannabis, legislation, and an unstable global economy have forced Headshop.com to continually pivot over the years. Matt credits being flexible as the reason that his company has survived (and thrived) when faced with obstacles.
4. There’s No ‘Should’ in Entrepreneurship: Being an E-Commerce entrepreneur means problems arise that are unique to your company, values, and goals. Matt reminds us that the lessons we learned about how we ‘should’ do something rarely work. Rather, evaluate the problem on your own terms to find the best solution.
5. Be Curious: Curiosity is a hallmark trait of most successful entrepreneurs. Matt’s purchase of Headshop.com was driven by both personal passion and professional curiosity – recognizing early on the challenge and potential of translating the unique, sensory-rich head shop experience into a compelling online presence.
When Matt Hampton bought the domain Headshop.com in 2002, his vision was to create a dynamic marketplace for cannabis smokers. A self-professed ‘marketing nerd,’ he knew to attract attention, the message needed to not be just about smoking, but also about experiences like going to concerts and hanging with friends. Be inspired by Matt’s story and how he went from selling bongs to cultivating a lifestyle brand as Headshop.com
Meet Matt Hampton, Founder of Headshop.com!
Created and curated by smokers, for smokers, Headshop.com is the #1 choice for the best online headshop and online smoke shop. Our mission at Headshop.com is to deliver to your door the latest and greatest in: dab rigs, pipes, bongs, vaporizers, rolling papers, popular smoking accessories, and more. Thousands of loyal customers enjoy Headshop.com’s fast, discreet shipping of amazing smoke shop products at competitive prices.
Connecting cool people and cool products for over 20 years.
In 2002, Matt Hampton bought the domain headshop.com. He was heading a successful web development company at the time and saw the purchase as “a good mix of my extracurricular activities and my day job.” Still a novelty in the late 90s/early 2000s, head shops offered a full sensory experience, alongside weed smoking accessories, were Nag Champa incense, and velvet blacklight posters, and beaded door curtains. Matt remembers, “It had a welcoming, cool, eccentric vibe that I knew you would never be able to recreate online, but I was very curious when I had the opportunity to buy the domain. I thought, ‘you know? We’ll figure this out.’”
Just as Matt was getting ready to launch, the Bush administration initiated Operation Pipe Dreams, which targeted businesses like his and made selling smoking paraphernalia online illegal. “In a weird twist of fate, it actually gave us a shot in the butt about what to do when you are faced with an unexpected situation,” he says. Forced to pivot, the company transitioned from a ‘head shop’ to a ‘dorm accoutrement shop’ expanding its product selection to include tapestries, incense, and candles. Matt finishes, “that was the first time that we got a taste and thought, ‘wow, this is a lot cooler as a lifestyle site than just a place that sells bongs.”
Long gone are the days of Headshop.com selling trippy room décor to college students. Today, products span multiple categories that include curated smoke devices and accessories, wellness, and adult. Matt discusses the evolution and how the website has developed into a B2B platform where businesses pay to have access to the online catalogue, along with fulfillment. “It allows us to expand our offering into products that we wouldn’t necessarily sell on Headshop directly, but do appreciate and think that there’s a place for them in the bigger marketplace.”
Headshop.com is made up of a fully remote, global team of 10-15 employees. Planning, strategic, customer service, and creative leadership are based in the United States. “Then we have outsourced team members all over the world who help us do everything from research to implementation to running campaigns,” notes Matt, who found early success hiring overseas for his first company in 2001.
“We’re in a fun space. We sell cannabis and adult toys,” Matt remarks. Being in the industry for over 20 years, he sees innovation as a combination of quality product and creative marketing. An ear to the ground allows Headshop to observe the latest smoke accessory trends, identifying the ones that have potential to make money. Matt gives vaporizers as an example – the grown-up who liked the early clunky version as an 18-year-old is going to love the sleek, updated model that fits in their pocket. “We have been very, very quick to adopt the things that make us think, ‘that is going to take off,’” he says, reiterating, “we just stay in touch with what’s going on.”
Matt’s marketing strategies begin with the question, “How do we get people excited about a product that they’ve never heard of before?” The answer: creating an extraordinary experience that leans into the smoking lifestyle. At the National Cannabis Festival in 2019, Headshop had a booth designed to look like a chill (but elevated) dorm room fitted with couches, coffee tables, a water cooler, and phone chargers. The major draw: smoking free weed from high-end pieces costing up to $600. “We had a line 1,000 people deep the whole day,” Matt says, remembering how successful the event was. “We connected the dots in a way that made it easy for people to experience things we knew they couldn’t experience.”
“420 is like our Super Bowl,” Matt reveals, with Christmas and back-to-school (students returning to campus) also being busy periods for the company. He’s quick to point out that because Headshop’s product selection includes adult and wellness categories, customers aren’t just shopping for smoke products, making business steady year-round.
Headshop’s customer service is handled by an in-house team. The liaison between the manufacturer and customer, the company aims to resolve issues quickly and build customer loyalty while making sure policies aren’t being taken advantage of (ex. trying to return a cracked bong after using it for a month). Approaching CS with an emphasis on building trust has been successful, Matt says, and goes on to tell a story about an early customer whose expensive device arrived with a scratch. “Nobody’s fault, just happened. We fixed it by giving him another one… He was blown away and has since then referred us to dozens of people… He’s like a rabid cheerleader for us, and it’s great.”
Transitioning into a B2B (business-to-business) company has allowed Headshop to broaden its scope of product categories beyond cannabis. Matt elaborates, “I think there’s a lot to be gained from growing horizontally through other verticals. We’ve got the infrastructure to do it now. And we have a growing interest in other distribution companies.” The adult category has created actionable opportunities for growth, says Matt, with Headshop doing white label for partnering businesses in the industry.
Continuing to cultivate the lifestyle side of Headshop is also a main priority. Explaining his vision, Matt recalls the initial business plan he had for the company. “If you put a bag of weed in the middle of the room and draw lines to things that you would relate to it, that’s what Headshop is about. It’s not so much about the bag of weed, but what the bag of weed brings to the party.” These lines lead to concerts, friendships, gifts for loved ones, and clothing and accessories. Social media provides an opportunity to create visibility, outreach, and messaging about the Headshop brand. “People sharing stories is easier on social media now than it has ever been,” Matt remarks. “We’re leaning into ‘how do you get people to be better brand ambassadors by giving them a great experience’”
“Being present in the marketplace is a great way to prosper, and not being present is a great way to fail,” Matt warns. The attitude toward cannabis has been inconsistent over the last 20 years, forcing Headshop to evolve and adapt in response to changing legislations, governments, and social and cultural opinions. Matt credits “staying present,” being perceptive, and seizing opportunities for his company’s survival, growth, and success stemming from product expansion. He concludes, “If you have a good idea and see a groundswell happening around something, throw up a landing page and see how much interest you get.”
Can’t-live-without-tool? SEMrush and Ahrefs. We are search velocity nerds. We want to know what people are searching for and build sentiment analysis around why they’re searching for it and react at that level.
Key hiring trait? Flexibility, because we are in need of being eternally malleable. You have to be able to bend, stretch, pull, and contract at a minute’s notice. It’s probably not going to work for people who come in looking for a checklist. Google might call us up one day and say they removed our feed - you have to be able to respond, and that could mean a lot of different things, but it’s likely going to mean that you will have to think outside the box to interpret the problem and figure out how to fix it. And it can’t operate from a script.
Favorite book or podcast? That’s a good question. I’m more into podcasts in the health space. I actually have one, Irreverent Health (check us out at IrreverentHealth.com), and we have around 150 episodes. I also like Andrew Huberman – that kind of content is very interesting to me. What’s good about those guys is that they’re marketing people. At the end of the day, they might be talking about biohacking, but those are marketing problems to solve. People who listen to their shows are unhealthy or they perceive themselves that way, and are looking for a way to fix it. That could be information or a product, or both. Watching how they solve those problems has always been informative to me about how to solve my own. Because I’m the marketing nerd going, “I see what you did there.”
#1 challenge as an E-Commerce entrepreneur? When I started my first company, I thought there was a finish line. We do this to get there. Not only has that never been right with any business that I’ve ever run, but it’s especially not true in E-Commerce. Every time Google comes up with a new algorithm or the government initiates a new mandate, in our case, there’s never-ending change. One of my biggest challenges is remembering that and not getting emotional about the fact that I was taught the wrong lesson. There’s a lot of evolution that has happened, and the world is different. We have different lessons, worldviews, and frames of reference. I’m the last from a group that was taught you work at a place for 50 years and get a watch. I have to fight that programming literally every day. You’re trying to make a good decision based on what you ‘should’ do. Then I’m like “no, you said you should again. Let’s get to what we can do and figure out the best thing to do.” Forget about should because that’s someone else’s programming, not mine.
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