Magic Flight is revolutionising the weed equipment market with wooden products made with love

Hand-made vaporizers serve as 'functional pieces of art'

Just a few years ago, if you wanted to buy some equipment for smoking weed, you were refined to a market stall or dingy head shop selling poorly-made products shipped in from Asia. You know the sort - neon plastic grinders with Bob Marley's face on, lumpy bongs in the shape of goblins, t-shirts emblazoned with alien faces saying 'take me to your dealer'.

Fortunately, as the use of cannabis slowly becomes destigmatised and various levels of legalisation or decriminalisation sweep the globe, those days are gone, and the market for quality paraphernalia is booming.

Five years ago, Magic Flight was one dude in his garage crafting vaporizers out of wood. Five years later it is an international company, one of the fastest-growing in San Diego and distributing all over the world with its flagship Launch Box product available in pretty much every head shop in the US.

Launch Box (@brbastard)

Mellow Bellows with Muad-Dib Launch Box

Its products, ranging from vapes to water filtration devices to bellows systems and many more, are beautiful. All hand-crafted out of quality woods and materials, inscribed, designed with ingenious practicality and finished to impeccable standards. They're so aesthetically pleasing that rather than stash them in a drawer you'll want to proudly display them, and they'd be perfectly at home on a coffee table or mantelpiece.

Their non-'illicit' appearance does a lot more than just improve owners' décor however, they're changing people's lives.

"I dealt with a lot of cancer patients who wanted to alleviate their pain but were concerned about going down the medical marijuana route," Beacon Nesbitt, Head of Sales at Magic Flight tells me.

"A lot of them said that our products really help them feel like they're medicating rather than doing something 'taboo' however."

Artisan Launch Box

Orbiter

With marijuana remaining in a bit of a legal limbo in the US at the moment, the company understandably maintains that its products are for use with 'herbs', lest the police coming knocking at their door, but the recent changes to marijuana legislation has certainly made a big difference to the demand for quality vaping (as opposed to smoking, there's no tobacco involved) equipment.

That being said, this demand runs deeper than just the growing weed economy, and the company's boom started long before.

It fits in with the slow living trend and the nascent demand for quality hand-made goods.

Launch Pad

Delta Box

Ritual is a huge part of it. Just as you might enjoy the ceremony of steeping a pot of tea or salting a steak, the idea is that you take your time with the equipment and appreciate its tactile processes. Magic Flight likes to call its products "functional pieces of art".

Competition in the market was inevitable, but, as you'd hope, Magic Flight's relationship with rivals like DaVinci isn't cut-throat - quite the opposite - they go out for beers with competitors and even encourage customers to combine their products with those made by others.

Kit like you're seeing in the pictures above could in the next decade become as common in the home as the TV set. But Magic Flight is determined not to succumb to the reduction in quality and outsourcing that often comes with mass-production.

"We do everything in house," Beacon explained, adding that keeping the products' hand-crafted vibe is "crucial, crucial, crucial."

@christophhooton