Black History Year - Happy Munkey - Vlad Bautista & Ramon Reyes

It’s hard to miss Vladimir Bautista and Ramon Reyes in the cannabis industry. These two know how to make a wave and be noticed. They run their own media companies on top of their cannabis brand, Happy Munkey: the Happy Munkey Podcast, Munkey Magazine, and Happy Munkey TV.

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As with most of the figures we profile in this series, Vlad and Ramon are just doing too damn much to keep up with and contain briefly, but we’ll do our best.

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“We don’t do it for the clout, we do it for the culture!”

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There are few people in the cannabis industry that truly are “for the culture.” Indeed, it’s really hard to identify just exactly what “the culture” is in cannabis. That term can summon images of hippies and war protestors, or rappers coming up in NY and LA, from ex-special forces legacy farmers with weed growing families to Chicano art-house punks using imagery to represent their resistance to oppression, all that and everything in between.

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For Vlad and Ramon, they come from a deeply Dominican neighborhood of Hamilton Heights in Harlem, NY. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s when NY was a lot more rough and tumble than today. Weed was a therapeutic medicine, helping to keep them focused and optimistic. They met in high school and began a lifelong friendship.

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The way they saw it, no one was properly galvanizing and representing the voice of the culture. For them, that was the NY cannabis culture they grew up in. Diverse, savvy, passionate, and always building towards something.

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Happy Munkey’s Genesis Story

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Ramon took a trip to Amsterdam in 2017 and experienced the joy and liberation of people consuming cannabis freely in public. He came back to NY brimming with excitement and clarity of vision. He shared it with Vlad and shortly afterward, Happy Munkey was born.

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Initially, it was about events and hospitality, showing the world what responsible cannabis consumption can look like, how normal and elevated it can be. They went from throwing their first event, to hosting events monthly and eventually daily. Their rise was meteoric.

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In 2021, Happy Munkey scored two HUGE wins for the culture. The first was Happy Munkey After Hours, a consumption event at the original Immersive VanGogh art exhibit, for which they won a Silver Clio award later. They also hosted a party to celebrate the end of prohibition on 4/20 at a prestigious steak house on Wall Street, right across the street from the NY Stock Exchange. This is how Vlad described that experience to Leaf Magazine:

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“When you think about it,” said Vlad, “doing a Cannabis event across the street from the stock exchange where they used to sell slaves, and to have politicians, doctors, lawyers, every walk of life, athletes, actors, smoking publicly – you can see the liberation and the freedom that people feel coming out of the Cannabis closet. People always assumed before now that Cannabis was for urban people and hippies, and now you see people smoking publicly. It changed the narrative and perspective and the stigma to see that this is a part of mainstream society right now, not like a taboo thing.” 

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Where is Happy Munkey headed in the future?

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These enterprising gents aren’t short on future plans. They are building Happy Munkey into a global consumption lounge franchise. Vlad wants people thinking about NY when they think about cannabis.

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Happy Munkey’s media empire will expand, hopefully through a big platform or media channel. It is their media empire that most people know them through, afterall. Along with it, they plan to release a bunch of new merchandise.

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Closer to fruition are their retail store plans; Vlad and Ramon are opening two retail locations in NY in the coming months, should everything go to plan (and in NY cannabis, nan nothing is going according to plan).

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It’s their impact, however, that contains their real vision for the future.

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“We want to [operate] out of New York factories, employ people here. We would love to give more people jobs, especially in the immigrant community, and be able to give back. If things continue as we predict, we can put ourselves in that position.”

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Their mission is to break the stigma while elevating the culture of cannabis in NY, as well as the immigrant, Black and Brown communities off of whose backs this industry was built.

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Check out Happy Munkey at their website here.

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Connect with Vlad and Ramon on LinkedIn and follow their journeys.

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Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/happymunkey/

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Ramon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramon-reyes-a27618190/

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