Creative Counts, Volume 27

Interview by Milk Team | with Sam Lim Achatz

You spoke about being drawn to surrealism, that moment when something familiar becomes slightly strange. We're curious about if you saw cannabis through that same lens. Was creating Hi-Snaps about taking something culturally familiar and reshaping it into a new form?

Seeing through a surrealist lens is about taking something ordinary and shifting its context just enough that you see it differently. “This beautiful packet squeezed into my tea… that can’t be illicit drugs, can it?”

And then you notice what it does: suddenly your sparkling water becomes a portal into another state of mind.

A slightly dreamy feeling is how I personally experience Hi-Snaps (I’m a total lightweight, heavy cannabis users literally laugh at me), so I wanted the product to hold that emotional quality. It’s low-dose by design — you’re not blasting off into outer space — but your inhibitions soften, stress lowers, creativity flows more freely, and there’s just a touch of magic where things feel a little more possible.

That’s also why we place Hi-Snaps in environments where cannabis historically hasn’t belonged — sound baths, fashion events, dinner parties, the opera, formal weddings. We recently made 100 custom tins for a bride to include in her guests’ welcome bags. I wasn’t interested in creating another THC drink. I was interested in creating something that offers people a subtle shift in perspective.

On being inspired by experimental gastronomy, specifically through your chef husband, and how he approaches his work as a craft, performance, science, and all the creative in-betweens. When your medium is a brand rather than a physical artwork or dish, how do you bring that same level of experimentation and sensorial thinking into your day-to-day life?

Being married to an extremely artistic and rigorous chef definitely rewires your brain. You should have seen the process of planning our wedding — it was the collision of highly technical hospitality expertise with the layered experiential thinking I developed while working at Milk and Pat McGrath. Every decision was intentional. Every moment had a narrative purpose. I collaborate with Grant often on conceptualizing dinners, experiences, and creative projects, and whether I’m working on something for the restaurants or developing Hi-Snaps, the same principle applies: Start with intention —> Define the emotional outcome —> Then design every detail to support it.

In experimental gastronomy, the plate is never just a plate — it’s choreography, psychology, theatre. So when your medium is brand instead of cuisine, everything becomes a sensory decision: the weight and size of the tin in your hand, the sound a packet makes when it snaps, the language that builds the story, all of these small details contribute to the ritual.

You described AI as amplifying curiosity by allowing ideas to move quickly into testing and execution. Could you share with us a recent moment where AI led you to learning something unexpected?

AI has become a powerful curiosity engine for me. It allows ideas to move quickly from vague intuition into something tangible.

Recently I needed a birthday gift for someone and asked ChatGPT for suggestions. What started as a simple question turned into a surprisingly deep exploration — personality traits, astrological archetypes, symbolic motifs associated with their birth date.

It ultimately led me to select a piece of jewelry featuring symbols tied to their chart, something I never would have arrived at on my own. The gift felt incredibly personal and meaningful, but the path to it only took about fifteen minutes. AI collapses the distance between curiosity and execution. You can follow threads of interest much further, much faster, and move with your intuition instead of fears and doubts. It is important to not be too hasty and still be well researched, especially given the wild hallucinations and slop still very prevalent in AI, but it's an incredibly powerful tool when used for creative thinking.

Often you end up somewhere you didn’t know you were looking for.

What’s the strangest rabbit hole you’ve gone down recently?

Victorian snuff boxes.

They were incredibly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries — small ornamental containers, often intricately decorated with enamel, silver, or gemstones, designed to hold powdered tobacco.

My business partner discovered a collection of them at The Met, and I had also noticed one while watching Bridgerton. When we realized they were almost exactly the same size as a Hi-Snaps tin, it sparked a whole line of creative thinking.

There's something very cheeky about the history of creating ornate objects intended to hold mind altering substances as if they were small treasures.

Hi-Snaps tins feel like a contemporary evolution of that tradition. One day we’d love to collaborate with artists to create collectible editions.

How have you filtered your lens of interest over time and where do you feel your curiosity pulling you next?

Over time I’ve become less interested in trends and more interested in connections.

Early in my career as a fashion and beauty editor in the 2010s, curiosity was oriented toward what was new and next because the pace of media back then required constant novelty.

Now curiosity feels more like tuning a radio frequency. I pay attention to ideas that resonate across disciplines: food, fashion, neuroscience, hospitality, ritual, design, travel. The connective tissue is always a story.

Right now my curiosity is pulling me toward understanding human behavior more deeply - how environments influence emotion, how small rituals can help people feel more present, more open, more connected.

THC happens to be one tool within that exploration.

Many people are still unfamiliar with how subtle, social, low-dose cannabis can feel. There’s a real opportunity to reshape that narrative in a way that feels intelligent, welcoming, and culturally relevant. We have many stories to tell.

We’re just getting started.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

See more from Sam on @iamsamlim as well as at @hi.snaps