How This Upstart NYC Business Is Getting New Customers Thanks to Carrier Pigeons

While legal dispensaries might be popping up all over New York City, winning the cannabis marketing game isn’t easy with the industry’s highly restrictive barriers to advertising. But one dispensary has taken flight with a tongue-in-cheek campaign featuring one of New York City’s most iconic residents. 

The Travel Agency, which has four strategically placed locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, launched a campaign on October 3 teasing the roll-out of its newest delivery method: carrier pigeon. 

The campaign, internally referred to as “Project Pigeon,” features a flock of 20 pigeons with custom-fitted mini-red backpacks designed to carry up to one gram of the dispensary’s product. The Travel Agency said that it was working in collaboration with professional pigeon handlers, both to acknowledge one of the city’s oldest mailing systems and to reimagine “what modern cannabis delivery can look like.”

On Friday, the company announced that—unsurprisingly—the cannabis-carrier pigeons will “never actually take to the skies,” co-founder and president Arana Hankin-Biggers says. The announcement revealed that the pigeon pilot program was simply an innovative way to build buzz around The Travel Agency’s latest move–expansion of their real in-house cannabis delivery service. 

“Project Pigeon was built as a playful, unexpected campaign that sparks joy, creates conversation and opens the door to destigmatization,” says Chesen Schwethelm, chief marketing officer of The Travel Agency. “The goal was to raise awareness that The Travel Agency is New York’s quickest, most trusted and legal cannabis delivery offering…we‘re just using wheels not wings.”

The cheeky campaign racked up over 2 million views across all platforms, including Fox 5 NY’s video on the campaign, which received 1.6 million views on TikTok, ignited online-debate in comment sections, and boosted social engagement tenfold.  In a social video titled “Meet the Fleet,” the creative campaign also showcased each bird’s personality, drawing on iconic New York City archetypes.

“The pigeons were the setup — this is the punchline,” said Schwethelm, “This is what we’ve been building toward all along. We’re not just delivering cannabis — we’re delivering creativity, accountability, and a vision for what modern cannabis retail should look like.”

Staying true to its New York City roots may be the easy part—but consistently innovating and staying creative in a highly competitive, tightly regulated market demands serious marketing and concept skills.

“Our social media platforms get pulled down on a regular basis. We can’t use the word cannabis. We can’t show cannabis products. We can‘t display cannabis in our windows. In our beautiful stores. We can‘t advertise on billboards. People walk by all the time not even knowing what we sell,” said Hankin-Biggers. “We have to make sure that 90 percent of the audience is over the age of 21. There are endless restrictions, and so you have to be really creative in this industry to attract attention and to get folks in the door.” 

It only makes sense that the cleverly named company for specializing in “journeys of a different kind” would make a play at exploring all methods of transportation. While the company had previously relied on third-party delivery services, The Travel Agency will now handle delivery in-house by optimizing its online ordering system. The company says this will improve speed, transparency, and order tracking, introduce customer loyalty programs, and expand delivery to all of Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as select neighborhoods in Queens.

For those who shared concerns of the inhumane nature of city pigeons as “delivery agents” the shoot was made in collaboration with licensed handlers and Safety On Sets Animal Services (SOS). The cannabis dispensary also emphasized its commitment to responsible marketing and animal welfare by making a donation to the Wild Bird Fund. 

This donation speaks to the company’s larger social commitments, which co-founder Hankin-Biggers says is “well within the fabric” of the company, which advocates for legal cannabis as a pathway to repair the harm caused by the war on drugs. The Travel Agency donates 51 percent of its profits to the Doe Fund, a nonprofit supporting formerly incarcerated and homeless Black and Brown men. The BIPOC-founded company also employs nearly 250 individuals, 70 percent of which are people of color, many of which were formerly convicted for selling cannabis illegally, prior to its legalization in 2021.