Sherbinski vape carts are the latest brand to see a round of counterfeits on the usual channels. With their plain orange box packaging, it’s hard to imagine what they were thinking. Having produced the most easily counterfeited packaging in the history of vaping, they are now counterfeited.

Sherbinski’s is a very real company, but fakes are popping up all over

There is the Sherbinski’s website. Sherbinski’s is a very high-profile cultivator, original cultivator of the cannabis strains Pink Panties, Sunset Sherbert, and the Gelato line : Bacio, Mochi, Acaiberry, and Gello. Sherbinski founder Mario Guzman is not to be confused with the actor of the same name, nor is he any apparent relation to actor Luis Guzman and family.

Sherbinski’s makes their own hardware, a 510 vape pen with medical grade stainless steel. The counterfeits almost certainly do not maintain such quality standards. The pen was announced here.

Sherbinski’s also sells a chair. This culture gets weirder every day.

There is even a Sherbinski “culture playlist,” immerse yourself in the northern California ambiance.

When the Sherbinski’s start-up story first broke in Forbes, they were deemed “the Louis Vuitton of marijuana.” And there, pictured right on the same Forbes article, is the real Sherbinski’s vape pen packaging.

The interview raves on and on about classy high-end luxury Beverly Hills packaging in several pretentious paragraphs blah blah to wind up with this traffic cone orange color that is supposed to be the reinvention of cannabis branding. They’re not kidding about the orange. This nightmare is from the website:

Other places where Sherbinski’s snags ink includes HighSnobiety and The New York Times. Forbes even came back for seconds when Sherbinski’s co-marketed with Post Malone for a brand of prerolls, because that’s what the world needs is an orange cigarette.

And yes, we mean that Post Malone. This whole story gets more nauseating with every sentence.

And now for the fakes:

Here’s the first spotting on DHGate. True, they are sold out, but that just means they’re on the streets now, more will surely come.

We’ll go one better than DHGate, here they are at Vapes Wholesale, sold with a MOQ (minimum order quantity) of 100.

Gee, it’s almost as if the best way to have your brand widely counterfeited is to hype it up as ultra-luxury and then package it in a plain orange box with no identifying marks!

And here they are for sale in bulk on LeafedOut (how is this site still in business?) in Illinois. Sold by somebody who actually named themselves “God of Trees.”

Reddit spots the fakes:

• • 13 days ago – when OP finds out its fake, he resolves to sell it to someone else
  • another 13 days ago
  • 2 months ago – how many times are people going to post videos of turning the cartridge upside down?
  • 3 months ago
  • these Pink Panties find is the most recent

And finally, here is a plug showing off sham Sherbinskis right next to sham Roves:

It couldn’t happen to a worse brand

This kind of massive media hype campaign, like the one around all things Sherbinski, does not happen organically! Not in the least bit. We’ve seen thousands of cannabis startups, none of them made it all the way to Billboard magazine based on a tenuous musician connection. We have personally known the top players in the cannabis industry since day one, none of them have had their press release launch with the same phrase repeated across 37 news sites. Sherbinski has been a multi-million-dollar astroturf marketing effort from beginning to end.

We’re pretty sure that the company founders had no concept of the cannabis vape cartridge black market, else they would have implemented any security measure at all. Some might even be moved to wonder if they did know exactly what would happen and didn’t care.

Your strategy with Sherbinski’s is clear: Avoid anything orange!

Socially distance yourself from that traffic cone orange color like it was a vial of COVID-19, and you have nothing to worry about. It’s really impossible to tell real from fake in this case, unless perhaps you import images into Photoshop to sample shades of orange with the color-dropper tool and compare hexadecimal numbers.

Readers, have at our forum and tell us what else there is to hate about this story. We’re sure we missed something.