Joshua Kesselman, the man behind the RAW® brand of rolling papers and other smoking accessories, didn’t name his brand after a process. He named it after a feeling. A feeling of realness, energy, and truth. The word came to him “through the emotion in a classic hip-hop track’s lyrics; a raw expression of honesty and intensity that captured exactly what I wanted the brand to stand for… Papers are about how it feels when you light up with people you love.”
If you want to understand him, start at the beginning. A New York kid collects rolling papers and learns that a thin sheet can carry feeling. That spark leads to a factory in Spain, a million-dollar bet, and a few hip hop co-signs. That path sets the stage for the brand that would make his name.
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Sit with Josh Kesselman and it becomes clear: his drive isn’t money. It is a rare obsession with rolling papers, down to details most people skip past.
He collected them. Before he was a world-famous businessman in the rolling-paper industry, he was an eccentrically dressed guy with binders of more than 2,000 packs from around the world, trading with a handful of equally obsessed collectors. And this was before the internet.
So, where did this drive for rolling papers, smokeskins, rolls, wraps, sheets, roll-ups, leaves, rice-style papers, and more come from?
The shop that made him belong
“I remember my dad doing magic tricks with rolling papers,” Kesselman says of late-’70s family holiday parties. “He’d light one, throw it up in the air, and it would just vanish. Nothing came down. When you’re a little kid and you see that, you’re like, ‘Magic is real.’ That was my first real experience with rolling papers.”
Back home, things were complicated. “It was harder for me to make friends,” he says. “My birth mother had serious struggles and was out of the picture a lot. My dad was a very good guy, but he was constantly working. I was raised more by my grandparents and by my beautiful Linda, from Trinidad. If you ask why I’m always laughing and smiling, that’s Linda in my soul; she knew joy like no other. My grandfather taught me business; my grandmother taught me resilience and unconditional love. I wouldn’t be me without them.”
Growing up in a complicated home, Kesselman dreamed of building a space where outcasts, introverts and odd people like himself belonged.
“As a teenager, I’d go to these smoke shops and witness coolness—long hair, round glasses, a hopped-up Camaro out front—and those guys looked free,” he says. “I admired them and wanted to be like them.” By then, he was already trading packs with collectors and cataloging his own.
In 1993, during his senior year at the University of Florida, he turned a class project into a real store: Knuckleheads Tobacco & Gifts in Gainesville. “I sold everything I owned and maxed out all my credit cards. Kept a $500 van and a Harley I built myself, and moved into a friend’s storage shed to save on rent,” he says. “I’d have to jump over the lawnmower to get to bed, so I wouldn’t get clippings on my feet.”
He had no vendors, so he went to a famous South Florida head shop, flirted, begged and asked for old catalogs. “She gave me a stack. I ran to a payphone and called the first one: Adam’s Apple,” he recalls. “From there, I built relationships.” He kept the front door open during build-out with a sign — Coming soon — and filled the shelves by asking walk-ins what they wanted. “The Tom Sawyer fence method,” he laughs. “Let the community paint.”
The shop became a local hub. “I kept the Gainesville store open 24 hours because I was happy there and always wanted a place to connect with people—and because I’d grown up lonely. A shop makes you part of a community. Every stoner within 100 miles came just to feel not alone.”
Eventually, Josh put stores in five college towns. But then, the growth dynamic was interrupted by angry feds and old laws against paraphernalia.
A raid came.
“My store sold a bong to the adult daughter of a U.S. Customs Service special agent in charge. Next thing, helmets, machine guns, and threats to shoot my sweet dogs,” he says. “One thing they made very clear: rolling papers were legal; bongs weren’t. That ended my stores.”
He left Florida, moved west, and made a decision: I love rolling papers, rolling papers are legal, and the universe wants me to concentrate on making the best papers in the world!
Beauty Is the Eye of the Collector
The next step in his journey, the paper itself, came from disappointment. Back in 1993, he began selling a certain brand of ‘Natural American’ cigarettes in his store after a customer asked for them and ranted about how natural they were. The customer offered Josh one and he was shocked to see it was wrapped in a typical thick white bleached chalked paper. “I’m expecting unbleached, translucent…and it’s bright white,” he says. “I can taste the calcium carbonate—the chalk—on the back of my throat. Harsh. Ruins the flavor and makes me cough.”
That night, he thought about his collection.
“By then I had around two thousand packs—one of the biggest collections in the States—organized in binders and Ziplocs,” he says. “I realized: the thin translucent brown natural paper I’m envisioning doesn’t exist. That’s when I had the idea for RAW.”
His formula was simple and uncompromising: just two ingredients (plant cellulose plus a touch of plant starch that’s been positively charged to form a strong paper web). No bleaching. No calcium carbonate. No ammonia-dyed gum. Nothing extra. He would accept the trade-offs. “If it’s harder to work with on the machines, run the machines slower! Patch what you have to. Cut around what you can; each sheet should be unique like the smoker that rolls them.”
A Spaniard Named José Emilio
Collectors learn where the good stuff comes from. For Kesselman, the trail led to Spain’s Valencian region and to José Emilio, who had revived an old rolling papers factory with machines and workers from the former Bambú plant after losing a long legal fight with a Chicago-based huge tobacco megacorp. At first, José was reserved; seeing Josh, a young, long-haired American, talking about papers wasn’t enough. That changed when Kesselman mentioned the family magic trick and the Marfil papers that his father loved.
“He says, ‘Josh, my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, all on my wife’s side—we made Marfil.’ We agreed we had to bring it back,” Kesselman recalls, but they eventually realized they couldn’t use the name due to that mean old Chicago lawsuit.
“So we named it Elements after the elements used to create the plants for the paper, a rice-style paper thin enough to be translucent.”
The partnership widened. “José also had old machines and techniques for flavored papers. We made Cool Jay’s menthol, then Juicy Jay’s watermelon, and more,” he says. The operating model set then still holds: work with the best paper mills in Europe to mill a custom base sheet, ship that huge mother roll to José’s factory in Spain, where he would press, dry-calender watermark, sonder, and finish the paper with a gum José mixed from acacia tree sap and heat-applied to the sheet, and interleaving everything into a booklet. “We tried other factories. José’s work just hit different. You notice his perfectionism in the small details of the way the paper burns and tastes.”
In 2019, with José nearing 80 and grieving his late wife María, who was instrumental in sourcing what became RAW, the factory was sold to Kesselman’s family. “He liked that my wife would own it,” Josh says. “On his side, too, women held the majority.”
José still pops into Josh’s life to advise, and Kesselman is still collecting history, like a single-wide machine he estimates is from 1870 that he’d been begging a collector for.
“I finally got it,” he smiles. “Not relevant to production, but relevant to the soul.”
You see. A collector.
Million Dollar Bet
The real resistance to producing the unique sort of natural, unbleached rolling paper that everyone knows RAW for came from the mills.
“I’m pitching a translucent, unbleached sheet with minimal additives,” he says. “Most mills laughed— And my runs were too small.”
Every mill has a number, an order size big enough to make them say yes. Eventually, a smaller mill put a price on the table. “They said, ‘Commit to a massive buy,’ which amounted to what seemed like all my savings,” he says. He had done it before, risking everything and going all in on a dream. The amount was different, but that did not stop Josh.
He committed and ordered the giant mother rolls, tens of thousands of feet long, probably worth over a million dollars.
He was also pushing against centuries of conditioning. “Historically, white paper meant ‘pure.’ Early Spanish labels even said ‘higiénico [hygienic],’” he says. “RAW flipped that. The point wasn’t whiteness; it was rightness—the kind of natural paper that feels human and real, closer to how you might imagine feeling in olden times if you were sitting around a campfire with your tribe, burning hemp, and taking in the smoke.”
How RAW actually spread
Josh, who studied marketing at the University of Florida in the early 90s, prepared a tactical launch. “We bought ads—even in High Times—hit every main trade show and sesh event, and most importantly, I shared a lot,” he says. “If you want the truth about a paper, place it in a sesh circle and let the paper do the talking.”
He was trying to switch consumption habits among cigarette and weed smokers, not used to seeing, let alone smoking with translucent brown papers.
Then culture did what culture does.
“Curren$y rapped about RAW—‘it’s a RAW paper, not a blunt’—and that opened a lot of doors. I went on tour dates with him, met many people,” he says. “Wiz Khalifa is a real smoker and a good dude. I never paid him to sing about my stuff. He made a song called ‘RAW’ on ‘Black Hollywood’ because he loved it. That was the rule: no hired guns. If you don’t actually roll RAW, we’re not doing a deal. Consumers can tell a check from a choice.”
A canceled co-appearance with Wiz in Arizona led to an unexpected lane. “People were already lined up, but Wiz got sick. I showed up anyway with some of the Taylor Gang guys,” he says. “We signed, told stories, took photos. Nobody left the line. After that, I started doing appearances. My social media blew up.”
When the pandemic hit, he pivoted to teaching. “I thought it was going to last three weeks,” he laughs. “I did daily videos: how to smoke out of an apple or a banana, make tips from index cards, roll with the grain—old tricks no one had talked about in ages.” He also used the platform to fact-check industry myths. “A huge tobacco company started pushing a history that didn’t match my knowledge, to promote their papers,” he says. “So I flew to Seville, Spain and filmed where Encyclopaedia Britannica says we humans first rolled up in paper in the 1500s! If I have to teach, I’ll teach.”
A public figure who still acts like a shop guy
Kesselman is frank about enjoying the attention — but he frames it as a cure for a long, lonely arc. “Being kinda famous for smoking means I can make friends anywhere,” he says. “If they know me, they’re probably smokers, so we already have common ground. In Bali, I posted, ‘I’m here—meet me at this bar,’ and locals showed up on scooters. I had friends that night and a great time!”
The flamboyance is real, the collector mentality is real, and so is the willingness to hop on a plane to chase a story or an antique press. The operating style is grounded: a paper without yucky additives, a Spanish factory, a deep respect for the craft he found in the Valencian region, and an absolute insistence on true independence and authenticity in marketing.
“We’ve always kept final manufacturing of our booklets in Spain,” he says. “Mills can change just like the yarn that was spun into your shirt, but the real magic is Spanish. That specialized craft is why the paper burns so beautifully.”
He’s also unromantic about copycats. “People make papers that look like RAW,” he says. “But they don’t use our techniques, skills, nuances and lord only knows about their ingredients. Their imitations come out different, it feels different, and it doesn’t connect with the soul. That’s the difference.”
If you’re looking for a tidy origin myth, he won’t give you one. What you get instead is a chain: a child watching a paper vanish, a lonely student opening an all-night shop to build a community, a collector who didn’t see the paper he envisioned in 2,000 packs, a Spaniard whose family made Marfil, a million-dollar order for mother rolls, and a name pulled from a mixtape in the refrigerator.
Kesselman’s life reads like it was lifted straight from a novel. And of course, there’s plenty more drama ahead — we’ve only scratched the surface so far. To find out what happens next, you’ll have to turn to part two.
