Riding the Wavves: Wavvy Supply Co.

Art and weed go together like words and guitar.

For Nathan Williams, frontman and songwriter behind avant-surf-psych-punk-indie-hyphenate rock bastion Wavves, that synergistic power pairing makes up his entire business philosophy.

You may know Wavves from their high-profile albums that mix catchy-as-hell songwriting with rough, experimental sonic edges. Nathan himself described it to us in one interview as “trippy Beach Boys mixed with Sonic Youth.”

They launched into the San Diego scene nearly two decades ago with their self-titled debut, and by the time they dropped their third album, “King of the Beach,” they were icons of the indie scene.

“The third song I wrote was called ‘Weed Demon,’” Nathan said in an interview in late January while prepping for his upcoming world tour. “I’d always been writing about weed; it was always a quintessential part. Before I recorded anything, I sat down, I would smoke. And then people started mentioning it and everything.”

Fast-forward to now, and Nathan co-owns Wavvy Supply Co., an artistic experience-driven brand that seeks to unify weed and art in direct, mind-bending ways.

It all started roughly 15 years ago, when Nathan got tired of people mischaracterizing his Cannabis use as something negative. So he leaned in.

“They talked about Wavves as this stoner slacker,” he said. “I was this stupid stoner slacker idiot. And I didn’t like the way that they talked about me being a stoner. It always had to be a slacker or this stupid idiot. And I don’t know. The integration was kind of simple. I mean, ‘King of the Beach’ had my cat at the time, his name was Snacks, with a weed leaf on his head as the cover.”

He decided to own the image and show them what a stoner can really do.

“It was always integrated there, and it wasn’t something I wanted to escape. I didn’t want to just be like, ‘No, I don’t smoke weed. I’m not a slacker or whatever.’ There was a space in the market of merchandising where, if bands made merch, they made T-shirts. And also at the time, I remember in the underground scene, if you brought T-shirts to sell as merch, depending on where you were playing, some of the other bands would look down on you. You’ve got merch. It was not a cool thing,” Nathan said. “So at that point, I was kind of like, fuck all of you guys. I’m going to make everything. And so I got the weed grinder idea one day, and the papers idea, and I had Snacks the cat with his little weed leaf on ’em. I didn’t know that they would be so big. So that was kind of the beginning of it.”

Nathan launched Wavvy Supply Co. in 2025 on 4/20, after working for a couple of years building the project with co-owners Christian Ardel and Mac Meara.

“I met Christian, and he was telling me that I should start a weed company, and I had told him I’d been approached by multiple people to essentially white label something for them,” he said. “He was like, ‘You should come by the facilities and see what I have. Come by the farms or whatever.’ So I came by and realized that he was legit. … We kind of just started building it there.”

Nathan’s vision included building collaborative projects with visual artists and amplifying their work and his weed together. He first started sharing the vision with his friend, Killer Acid, who first collaborated with Wavves on an enamel pin in 2013. It’s that concept that he brought to Christian during their initial conversations.

“When he asked me, ‘What’s your vision? What would you call the company?’ and I said it all,” Nathan said. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, did you just come up with that?’ I was like, ‘No, I’ve had this for years.’”

In a way, Nathan is an artist who’s building a company because he’s tired of how companies treat artists.

“As an artist, you get these jobs from companies sometimes, and you talk to your buddies about it because the guy at the head of the table just doesn’t understand what’s going on,” he said. “They’re commissioning art, but they don’t really know the art they want. … This is why corporate gigs kind of suck. They’ll pay you more, but it’s kind of soul-sucking. So we want to be able to give artists the money, the corporate money, but we also want them to do their own thing and not feel like you’re making something for Meta, and you have to deal with some douchebag who doesn’t really understand what’s happening.”

Wavvy Supply Co. is currently available on the California market, where they’re rolling out vapes, flower and concentrates in their artist-driven packaging, and have a plan to launch in New York later this year.

“We got the artist series right now,” Nathan said. “Our first one is with Jay Howell, who created “Bob’s Burgers,” a good friend of mine. Then the one after that is with another friend of mine, Matt Furie, who created Pepe the Frog and is one of the best artists in the world. Super cool.”