The Great Ganja Scavenger Hunt.
A 4/20 weekend activation that turned six Long Island City shops into a one-day game board for Trends Dispensary, the first Black-owned dispensary in LIC. Concept, mechanics, and finisher fabrication by the/web studio.
4/20 only matters if the whole neighborhood feels it.
Trends LIC wanted a second-year flagship moment for 4/20 weekend. One that drove foot traffic to the dispensary and pulled customers into the surrounding shops on the same trip.
The Carter brothers (Rodney ‘Hurricane’ Carter Jr. and Brandon Carter) opened Trends on a community-first thesis: the first Black-owned legal dispensary in Long Island City, the 100th license issued under New York’s Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, and a 6,000 sq ft space that already hosted yoga and a Wellness Fest. The 4/20 brief had to live up to that.
We pitched a format that turned the neighborhood itself into the product.
The neighborhood as the game board.
Six secret partner businesses become clue stops. Snap a photo, tag the right accounts, collect a letter. By the finish line you’ve spelled T·R·E·N·D·S.
A scavenger hunt where every stop is a real LIC shop, every photo is a tagged social post, and every finisher walks away with something tangible. Tickets at $4.20. Check-in at noon at Trends. Up to four hours on foot. Solo or group-friendly.
The format is a positive-sum activation: each clue stop is a tiny ad for a local business, each tagged photo is owned media that lives past the day. Trends gets the gravity of the start and finish line; partner businesses get foot traffic and discovery; participants get a game and a bag.
The mechanics are content-neutral. The same letter-collection format can be re-themed for any host brand or any neighborhood.
The route went public ten days out. Trends and partners cross-posted.
From idea to a system that runs on day-of.
The hunt format.
Six-stop trail. Photo-and-tag at each stop. One letter collected per stop spelling T-R-E-N-D-S. Four-hour cap. Start and finish at Trends. A system simple enough to run on paper and Instagram.
The finisher prize.
A custom rolling tray awarded to every participant who completed the hunt. Designed in-house and produced on our 3D-print stack so the run scaled to the ticket cap without flat-tooling cost.
Day-of choreography.
Setup at Trends, clue handoff at partner stops, time-cap monitoring, finisher fulfillment. Not the brand-to-brand outreach (that was Trends, and they ran it), but the scaffolding the day ran on top of.
Trends owns the relationships. We built what runs on top of them.
Designed in-house · printed at run scale
One per completed hunt · awarded at the finish line
Year 1 launched it. Year 2 scaled it. Year 3 already greenlit.
now an annual LIC fixture
activated for Year 2
directly to participants
‘next year is going to be even bigger’
The hunt landed across city and neighborhood press, drove a tagged-photo trail of owned content through partner accounts, and warmed the audience for Trends’ ‘Meet The Brands’ customer event the following Friday: a 20+ brand showcase on the same dance floor.
Seven LIC institutions hosted the route.
From a climbing gym to a barbershop to a bowling alley, the Year 2 partner roster cut across categories on purpose. The hunt only works if the trail feels like LIC, not a marketing radius.
Two years of press.
The Great Ganja Hunt launched in April 2025 as a buzzy debut, written up by Time Out NY, and returned in 2026 with a wider press footprint, a new tagged-photo mechanic, and Trends already publicly committing to a third edition. What started as a one-day experiment is now an annual LIC fixture.
Year 1 ran in April 2025 and is consistently referenced in Year 2 press as the ‘buzzy debut’ that launched the tradition. The proof point that anchored every 2026 article.
The Great Ganja Hunt isn’t a one-off. Through 2025, Trends LIC built a calendar of neighborhood events that put LIC shops in front of new customers. The hunt is the flagship tentpole, and Trends has continued building around it.
The 2025 Mocktail Battle Royale and the inaugural LIC Wellness Fest were Trends-led programs we did not work on directly. Included here to show the larger neighborhood-engagement pattern the Great Ganja Hunt anchors.
Owned channels carried it.
The announcement: ‘Wait until you see what’s in the bag.’ Sets up the grand prize and the format week-of.
The recap: ‘Y’all showed out.’ Trends thanks the partner businesses by name and previews ‘Meet The Brands’ the following Friday.
Project credits and scope of work.
We pitched the idea and built the system. Trends ran the brand-to-brand coordination. Both halves have to be real for an activation like this to work, and credit reads cleaner when it’s split honestly.