40 Under 40: Harrison Bard and Fredrik Rading

Custom Cones USA was an unexpected, runaway success for co-founders Harrison Bard and Fredrik Rading. The wildly successful Washington-based rolling paper company ships throughout the United States and 47 other countries, serving about 18,000 clients that range from head shops to the Jordanian military.

Bard and Rading founded the company as a side project in 2017, right at the onset of recreational sales in California and Canada. And their success might be credited to Amazon’s famously caustic work environment, where they first worked together.

“They’d throw so much at you and so much is changing that you have to ruthlessly prioritize your day,” Bard says.

“We were really grinding ourselves down, working a ton and we were getting fed up,” Rading says. “We were like, ‘What’s the point of this?’”
Looking for a way out, Bard told Rading an idea he had in high school of making a rolling paper out of cannabis. They quit Amazon a month later to work on the idea full time.

“We really didn’t know what we were doing,” Bard says. “All we knew at that point was if we don’t quit, we’re never going to figure this out.”

They spent a year in R&D, burning through most of the money they had saved. They started considering other options for revenue while they continued developing the concept. Rolling papers seemed like a natural fit but then a manufacturer in India suggested they sell cones. A little research showed a massive demand for the product.

“We were like, ‘This could be a quick way to make money, keep funding ourselves while we figure out this weed paper thing,’” Rading says. “Then it blew up and took over, and we were like, ‘Okay, this is the right direction to go in.’”

“What gave us a lot of confidence to put our focus on this and less on the papers made of weed is that this is something scalable, something we can sell to all 50 states and internationally,” Bard adds. “We’re not limited to finding people who have licenses or partnerships.”