Today we’d like to introduce you to Ophelia Chong.
Ophelia, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Today, the story of StockPot Images ® is rooted in many lives, and many realities, but it all began with my sister, who copes with an incurable disease. She came to visit me and tried cannabis to help alleviate her symptoms.
Suddenly, she became visible to me in new ways; looking beyond pharmaceuticals, my sister entrusted an ancient plant with a 5,000-year history to promote her healing, health and well being. “How does the media portray people like my sister?” I wondered. I embarked on a quest to explore prevailing images and representations and noticed that various stock photo agencies were rife with stereotypes. No one looked like my sister.
This laid the groundwork for our mission: to advocate for the legalization of cannabis and offer truthful reflections of the faces and communities that embrace cannabis. We are changing the face of cannabis.
StockPot Images is the first stock-photo agency to specialize exclusively in cannabis-related imagery. We feature rights-managed and royalty-free photography, illustration, and video. Our selection reaches far beyond the small number of stereotypical images currently offered by major stock agencies and refocuses on aesthetic, content, and feeling.
We curate from a select group of up-and-coming photographers, and we work with them to create the content that will fit the needs of the burgeoning cannabis industries. We believe in partnering with our contributors, so we can both flourish and thrive in our rapidly changing landscapes.
StockPot Images targets healthcare, ad, and branding agencies, as well as corporate and emerging industries that will need cannabis images to service a new market of users.
State by state, marijuana prohibition is ending, and the cannabis industry is evolving into a nascent economy with great impact on everything from pharmaceutical offerings to local politics and parenting. We’re at the ready with a wide variety of fresh visual representations of cannabis in our culture.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It was an epiphany that created StockPot Images when I looked at my sister when she was using cannabis for her auto-immune illness, I thought “oh she’s a Stoner”. My epiphany was that I was stereotyping her in the same way people of color were stereotyped, I am Chinese American. From that moment on I was on a journey to change how I thought of the cannabis community and to help others as well see past the stereotypes.
Starting the business was the easy part, the banking was my first roadblock. I went to the bank I had been a client of for two decades and was told “we have to put this on a two week review because of the cannabis”, I replied “I don’t touch the plant, it is only photos, plus would you tell this to every client walking in or just me?” I walked out of that bank with checks totaling all my accounts there and walked across the street and opened an account at a rival bank.
Please tell us about STOCK POT IMAGES, LLC.
We are the “Getty Images of cannabis”, our collection is the largest in the world with the most comprehensive collection of over three thousand strains.
StockPot Images’ images cover from seed to sale, from canopy to indoor, from greenhouse to lab, lifestyle, food from child to senior, we have the largest collection of the cannabis industry. Just this year we have also included psilocybin mushrooms because I predict that as the next trend in micro-dosing and for commercial and recreational.
We are the only cannabis and psilocybin stock photo, illustration and video agency in the world.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If I had to start over, I would’ve started a year earlier.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2364 W Live Oak Dr.
- Website: https://www.stockpotimages.com/
- Phone: 1 323-388-5608
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/stockpotimages/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stockpotimages/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stockpotimages
- Other: http://www.asianamericansforcannabis.org/
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