SevenSense Intl.’s Founder & CEO Demonstrates How to Make Something Out of Nothing
Picture a flea market in The Deep South.
The bustle of weekend shopping is dying down. Folks slip into their cars, exhausted from ambling down row upon row of knickknacks and curios, haggling and inspecting and haggling some more. Small-town business types, even more exhausted, pack up their stations, tallying the past few days’ successes and losses.
It’s the beginning of spring, and though the last vestiges of winter have moved out, a final chill hitches a ride in the glow of a setting sun. In short order, the emptied market gives way to wildlife: lightning bugs flare, junebugs rumble, and treefrogs trill under swaying magnolias. It’s idyllic. Charming. Warm.
Then there’s the prowler.
It’s the dead of night, Memorial Day weekend, and the South Carolina smoke shop called Seven Sense Intl. is as still as a statue. The metal gate around owner Jack Privett’s wares is shuttered, and the merchandise is perched, pretty as a picture, ready for the following weekend’s shoppers.
In an instant, Seven Sense Intl.’s corner of the bazaar goes from beloved purveyors of smoke accessories to victims of smash-and-grab bullshittery.
“Our store was ransacked,” Jack tells HeadQuest, his gravel-laden voice apropos to his vendibles. “A bunch of inventory was stolen — lots of water pipes and soft glass.” Some of what wasn’t stolen was simply shattered in a chaotic mess about his feet. “All in all, maybe a grand or so in merchandise [was lost],” he says.
The thing about being good guys, though, is that you don’t stay down for long before the locals rally.
“A few hours later, a customer comes in and says, ‘I know who did it, and that’s not cool,’” Jack says. “The customer said, ‘Here’s this dude’s address, his name, number, everything — do with it what you will.’” Jack promised to keep the interaction anonymous. “I’m not going to put you in the middle,” he told the guy, adding: “Here’s some store credit.”
Using his connections with local police who would occasionally stop by to check in on Seven Sense (and to buy some nicotine disposables themselves) Jack took up earlier offers for help, should he ever need it.
He rang a deputy sheriff — “I knew him by his first name, and had his phone number, I could call him at home in an emergency” — and told him about the shattered and stolen products. Further, he had intel on the suspect.
The deputy wasted no time: “He said, ‘Can you get one of your friends to meet up with this guy? We can set something up.’” And that’s exactly what happened. Jack arranged for a friend to meet up with the guy “for a good deal on some pipes.”
Armed with a time and a place, the officer showed up to the drop and “just sat there on the corner and watched him,” Jack tells us. “He watched my friend go to the trunk and look at my stuff and say, ‘Oh yeah, no thanks — not interested.’” When the thief pulled away, the deputy hit the gas and visually scanned the car for a legitimate reason to pull it over. As fate would have it, the burglar had a taillight out. Once detained, he gave the officer permission to search the vehicle. Trunk opened, there was the Seven Sense Intl. loot, complete with Seven Sense stickers that tied it back to the open-air market.
“The officer called me and said, ‘I got your stuff, all you have to do is identify it,’” Jack says. He headed down and once on the scene, “It was hilarious. You see a squad car with the lights on, someone getting arrested, then an officer helping two guys carry bongs across the street and handing them to some other guys. It looked backwards.”
After all was said and done, Jack ended up getting all of his stuff back.
“It’s pretty awesome, actually,” Jack laughs. “Anytime we’ve ever had a problem that we’ve posted on Facebook … something comes up stolen or some issue like that … somebody will tell on them, because we’re seen as cool. It’s like, ‘Don’t do that to them, those are good people.’”
Even though he’s been through some tough times these past few years, one thing no one’s gonna do is get Jack Privett rattled. For someone who was lamenting how down Black Friday sales were, his voice came through the phone that afternoon with the laid-back panache of a man who’s been through it all. There’s a reason for that.
I’ve never had any credit. No credit card or any financial assistance of any kind . . . [After the first $120], I never spent another penny of my own money.
Working as a courier and corporate account manager for Kinkos — “Before FedEx bought them, which is why I quit” — he wanted more out of life than taking orders as a corporate 9-to-5er. Taking orders has never been his bag: Jack left school in the 10th grade over petty rules and pointless tasks. “I always did well on tests,” he says, “but would never do homework or anything I didn’t agree with.” Jack flunked P.E. when he refused to change clothes in front of people or go outside when it was hot. He didn’t pay attention in Driver’s Ed because “I already had my license! I was driving and working way before I was 16.” The annoyance in his voice comes through as he recounts being told to pull his pants up over and over, but he eschews it with a laugh. “Yeah, 10th grade was it for me — I had better things to do.”
With the grit of a young man who’d just given himself a sink or swim imperative, Jack bought himself $120’s worth of incense and began moving product at the flea market. The proceeds were investing from one strategic buy to the next, painstakingly building Seven Sense from the ground up.
“I’ve never had any credit,” he says. “No credit card or any financial assistance of any kind. Apart from that, I’ve never not worked a day outside emergency or vacation, ever since.” Asked how he came upon his business savvy, he says: “I just did it. I started at the flea market and went from there. I got a regular old business license to start and went piece by piece.” From that $120 and onward, Jack “never spent another penny of my own money.”
It’s that very fortitude that keeps his voice steady even though the words are grim. At the outset of our call, he was lamenting what he feels was a marketing rip-off that recently took him for five figures. To scale the business, Jack hired a company that supposedly specializes in cannabis retail to build him a decent website. His return? An online presence that advertised products he didn’t even carry. “It seemed like they were using a lot of AI stuff,” he says. “It was like they weren’t even proofreading or looking at what they were doing, just hitting [publish].” He doesn’t want to name them, but lumps that hit in with another financial gut-punch: the pandemic. “Since COVID, things have just been harder, at least with all the traditional methods,” he says. “We’ve never had a Black Friday that didn’t outdo the previous year, and we’re located on a really busy thoroughfare.” He says that traffic usually backs up on the highway outside his shop, but that didn’t happen this year. “It’s been rough.”
One thing has remained steady, however, and that’s his regulars. “We have a base here, so lots of folks in the military will stop in,” he says. It’s hard to believe, so he clarifies with an audible smile: “They don’t smoke but their wives do!” He says military personnel are also into nerd culture, and will drop by for DVDs, shirts, and other items of interest. A gander at the Google reviews shows album after album of a spacious, colorful store that would titillate any pop-culture enthusiast and/or smoke devotee.
See for yourself, and peep Seven Sense’s website. It’s changed since our December interview and it looks pretty good. (Way to get after it, Jack. As usual.) “We cordially invite you to explore our exceptional range of original branded merchandise, meticulously curated through an extensive search process that took us across the seven seas and beyond,” a welcome message reads. That appears to be no exaggeration: The inventory is thousands strong and advertises anything from smell-proof bags to kratom capsules, horror collectibles, natural soaps, and, of course, all the smoke accessories you can sic a cool deputy on.
If you can’t find what you’re after, you can give him a ring and ask him anything. Except, of course, to pull up his pants.
