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Austin Dawood, CEO What role does HiStandards play in addressing compliance and performance challenges in cannabis packaging?
HiStandards operates at the intersection of these challenges. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Troy, Michigan, the company serves as a one-stop partner, offering compliance-ready, custom-designed bags, tubes, jars, labels and display materials.
What sets HiStandards apart is its focus on custom development. From the very first design stage, the team applies engineering judgment to align regulatory requirements, production realities and retail performance. This thoughtful approach ensures that each design format meets functional requirements before finalization.
How does HiStandards apply engineering judgment during early packaging design and development stages?
HiStandards’ team brings deep industry expertise to every project. Led by a founder with over a decade of professional design experience, the company employs senior graphic and industrial designers who specialize in cannabis-specific packaging. While scalable, ready-to-deploy solutions are available, the same process also supports full customization. Using proprietary CAD and 3D design, HiStandards creates brand-specific packaging solutions, all from the ground up.
“Our team already knows the traps and friction points, so clients don’t pay to learn them the hard way,” says Austin Dawood, CEO.
Graphic designers focus on how packaging communicates and performs on the retail shelf, prioritizing brand clarity, shelf presence and sell-through. Industrial designers ensure those concepts hold up in practice, determining how a package opens, seals, protects the product, moves through filling lines and withstands shipping and storage. Both roles operate with cannabis-specific constraints in mind, including child-resistant standards, labeling requirements, dispensary handling realities and production limitations that often cause packaging to stall when addressed too late.
By resolving these variables upfront, HiStandards supports speed and scale without introducing operational risk. This approach preserves production efficiency and enables rapid-turn packaging in as little as seven days, helping brands scale effectively.
Why does HiStandards maintain end-to-end control across design, printing, labeling and fulfillment workflows?
A One-Stop Shop Workflow Designed for Consistency
Consistency is key and HiStandards achieves this by keeping the entire process, design, packaging, printing, labeling and fulfillment, under one roof. This ensures that design specifications and compliance decisions established early are carried through each stage of execution. HiStandards’ proprietary internal software connects quoting, proofing, order tracking and production into a single workflow, allowing approvals to move efficiently and ensuring that changes remain controlled across both custom projects and high-volume runs.
Early packaging decisions are carried forward across new SKUs, formats and markets. HiStandards stays with brands from the initial launch through sustained, multi-market expansion.
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Our team already knows the traps and friction points, so clients don’t pay to learn them the hard way through delays or rework.
Reliability at every stage is further ensured through standard operating procedures and built-in quality checkpoints. Combined with advanced printing methods and automation, this structure maintains compliance and accuracy as volume increases. After production, the company stocks brand packaging and ships on demand to processors or retail locations, reducing operational burden and enabling brands to scale without carrying excess inventory.
How did HiStandards prevent rework and delays during a large-scale multi-product cannabis rebrand?
Preventing Rework in Large-Scale Cannabis Rebrands
When a leading multi-location cannabis retailer needed to rebrand its entire portfolio, the challenge wasn’t just creative expression. It was maintaining structural consistency and production efficiency across more than a dozen product lines, each spanning multiple strains. HiStandards redesigned the packaging with a unified visual architecture that remained practical to produce and deploy at scale. Early design decisions around material specifications, label positioning and production handoffs prevented the rework and timeline drift that typically accompany large-scale rebrand rollouts. The outcome was a market-ready packaging system, built to scale across locations and product categories and structured to support ongoing portfolio expansion as the brand grows.
This approach has also supported numerous other clients, including JARS, Cheech & Chong, Society C, Exotic Matter and Bubbleman. HiStandards’ experience shows that packaging that prevents production problems and meets compliance requirements is also better positioned to perform at retail. This has been reflected in multiple Best In Grass and High Times Cannabis Cup recognitions.
These capabilities position HiStandards among the Top Customizable Packaging Solutions for Cannabis 2026, showcasing a team that consistently brings hard-won packaging knowledge into every decision, translating real-world packaging constraints into formats that run, ship and sell.
Why Custom Cannabis Packaging Is a Competitive Advantage for Growing Brands
Austin Dawood, Founder At HiStandards Packaging, we view custom cannabis packaging as more than just a requirement—it’s a competitive advantage. In today’s crowded retail environment, packaging is often the first interaction a consumer has with a brand, and it plays a critical role in communicating quality, identity, and trust. Our focus is on helping cannabis companies streamline their path to market with packaging solutions that are not only compliant and functional, but also built to stand out on the shelf. By combining design, production, and scalability, we aim to simplify the packaging process and support brands at every stage of growth.
