Tvrtko Kračun: The Cannabis Museum is a message to the Croatian Government and lawmakers

It is inevitable that legalization is coming; today, tomorrow, it does not matter. The only question is whether we will isolate ourselves from it, which would be extremely foolish as we have already lost many opportunities while waiting for numerous regulations and laws. I regret that we could have already established ourselves as a market and created a whole ecosystem around it. We could have been the first, and in the end, I fear, as has happened many times before, we could end up being the last in line that will have to import everything.

When someone with more than ten years of experience in various IT fields and digital marketing leaves a well-paid director position in an agency, many wonder if everything is alright with that person. Especially when they hear that he left a well-paid job to engage in cannabis, which has not yet, we would say, entered the mainstream in Croatia, the question marks above their heads only multiply. However, Tvrtko Kračun, the founder and co-owner of the Hemps.hr stores and the recently opened Cannabis Museum in Zagreb, knows he made the right move in wanting to present this plant to the domestic public in an educational way, precisely in the form of a unique museum, the first of its kind in the region. That the decision to open an educational center in the form of a museum was a good business move was also shown by the Clio competition in Las Vegas, where Tvrtko and his museum won several awards.

Can you tell us what kind of competition it is? When something is held in the legendary MGM hotel in Las Vegas, it must be a huge event?

– We could say that the Clio award in the marketing industry is what the Grammy is in music. There are several Clio awards, and we participated in the Clio Cannabis Awards, where we won bronze awards in three out of four submitted categories, and we were finalists in the fourth.

What are those categories?

– We won bronze in the categories of Social Good, Advocacy, and Experience and Activation, and we finished as finalists in the category of Product and Service Innovation.

What impressed the jury, what did you have to do to win those globally recognized awards?

– First of all, you must substantiate everything you did. You need to present what the media response to the project was, how people accepted it, and how they perceive it. And our response was enormous. For example, the Cannabis Museum Zagreb is the first from the wider region that has also appeared in High Times, the most famous and prestigious cannabis magazine in the world, which has been published since 1974. Besides the media response, which was global, we also conducted many useful humanitarian projects that contributed to the awards and global visibility.

What are those projects?

– We made significant donations for a therapeutic gardens project in Pušća. We also donated many of our plants from the Museum, which, of course, have the approval of the Ministry of Agriculture, and we held workshops to bring this plant closer to the general population. All of this is considered when it comes to the Clio awards, and I am actually most proud that we did everything with exactly zero kuna budget and that we outperformed many submitted projects from markets where cannabis is legal, such as the USA and Canada, where billions of dollars are turning and marketing budgets are counted in millions.

Is this museum actually a message to the Croatian government and lawmakers?

– Absolutely yes!

Let’s go back a bit to the beginning of the story. How and when did you decide to engage in cannabis? From a managerial position to the ‘green’ trenches…

– I must say that I started studying the plant as a kid: its benefits, what it is used for and where, and so on. This research certainly lasted between my eighteenth and early twenties, and I have always said that I would fully enter the industry at the first hint of legalization. Fortunately, that happened now when I have enough experience and enough capital to embark on such a story. If I had tried this, say, ten years ago, it certainly would not have been as successful as it is today.

I find it interesting that you have been studying cannabis since you were eighteen, but where did the idea for the museum come from?

– The idea came from the Chocolate Museum. I liked how it presented the use of the cacao plant throughout history, its production, and where it is today. It occurred to me that it is precisely in the form of a museum that the story of cannabis and hemp can best be told. We realized that many people actually lack the right information, so we decided on the concept of a museum as an information center.

Although you are practically next to the police, we hear that you have already had problems with burglars?

– Yes, we had one break-in.

Is it silly to ask what they stole?

– ‘Weed’, of course. The best part is that there is expensive equipment there, such as lamps, testing devices, and the like, but they didn’t touch any of that. Nevertheless, despite all these adversities, we are trying to stay positive.

What other adversities are you referring to?

– We have been targeted by the State Inspectorate about ten times.

What bothers them?

– The store at the entrance of the Museum, Hemps. They took samples of CBD flowers from us for testing, and several exceeded the level of 0.2 per mille. We are still struggling with that problem. After all, it is a plant, and not all of its processes can be controlled, and those small percentages that we exceeded are actually negligible. But our bigger problem is that they have seized all our teas for the second time, even though such teas are still available in dm, Konzum, and other retail chains.

How is it possible that dm and Konzum can sell CBD teas, but you cannot?

– Because we are a specialized store, we are a target. Otherwise, these teas are a Croatian product for which we had to pay for incineration, as special toxic waste, not in Croatia, but in Vienna, because toxic waste is not incinerated here.

So, the teas are toxic waste that must be incinerated in Vienna, while tons of hard drugs like cocaine and similar are regularly incinerated in Našice?

– Yes, our brand has suffered enormous damage because we target older customers who loved and bought those teas. Then questions start about why we don’t have them, and we are actually just losing customers who then think we are doing something shady and selling some illegal things, which is absolutely not true. I believe we will file a counterclaim, if necessary, even to Strasbourg.

What else did Tvrtko tell us, what plans he is concocting, and what cannabis projects are emerging in Pag, read in the printed or digital edition of the business weekly Lider.