The room that changed Erin Gore’s career was her own kitchen. Friends had gathered to bake, experiment and talk. Gore, trained as a chemical and biological engineer, became the person watching the measurements. She understood formulations. More importantly, she watched what happened around them: women asked candid questions, compared experiences and relaxed into a category that could feel awkward in a store. The gatherings grew until the house could no longer hold them.
A founder can spend years looking for a market signal. Gore found hers in the noise of a crowded party. The signal was not merely demand for another edible. It was the gap between curiosity and confidence. People wanted an easier way into cannabis, and the setting mattered almost as much as the product.
Garden Society grew from that observation. Launched in Sonoma County in 2016, the company paired craft confections and pre-rolls with the cues of Wine Country hospitality: considered ingredients, restrained design, a sense of occasion and patient explanation. Behind the floral surface sat the part Gore already knew well - specifications, repeatability, manufacturing and the stubborn logic of an engineer.
01 / The useful corporate education
An engineer learns to read the room
Gore came from Wisconsin and played varsity basketball at the University of Wisconsin before graduating in chemical and biological engineering. She then joined Henkel, the German consumer and industrial products company. Her career there lasted more than a decade and included responsibility for a global business valued at $100 million. She became the first woman to lead a business unit there.
Those facts explain more than a résumé line. Large consumer-products companies teach a particular form of seriousness. A product has to work after the inventor leaves the room. It has to survive sourcing constraints, production schedules, quality checks, price pressure and the peculiar habits of distribution. Gore learned to manage inside that machinery, then carried its useful disciplines into a young market where the machinery had barely been assembled.
At the same time, she worked with her husband on Tom Gore Vineyards, a joint venture with Constellation Brands. Wine offered a neighboring vocabulary for what she was beginning to notice in cannabis. Both categories are agricultural. Both depend on provenance and processing. Both are sold through ritual, story and social permission. Sonoma County gave Gore a live comparison between an established cultural institution and a product still surrounded by hesitation.
“Education, education, education. That is the most important thing we do at our company.”Erin Gore, on Garden Society’s operating premise
In 2014, at a wine event, Gore and marketer Karli Warner began talking about cannabis and the women being missed by the existing market. Warner had worked in wine communications and had helped launch Tom Gore Vineyards. The connection became consequential. Gore supplied the technical and operating center; Warner supplied brand and communications experience. By 2016, Garden Society was real, and Warner joined as co-founder.
02 / Packaging is the invitation
Building a doorway into a difficult category
The early Garden Society products made a deliberate argument. Cannabis could sit beside other thoughtfully made consumer goods without borrowing their stiffness. Fruit gelées, chocolates and compact pre-rolls arrived in packaging that looked suited to a dinner invitation. The company worked with Wine Country culinary talent, connected its brand to responsible farming and made education part of its corporate purpose as a benefit corporation.
The distinction went beyond making the box attractive. A box can win a glance. Gore was trying to reduce the social cost of asking a beginner’s question. The language, form and in-person gatherings worked together as a permission system. Garden Society’s target customer did not need to adopt the visual codes of an older cannabis culture to participate.
That distinction shaped the company’s go-to-market work. Garden parties and education events were intimate and useful, but they were hard to scale. Garden Society moved toward wholesale distribution, retail partnerships and in-store education. By 2022, Gore said the products were available through around 200 California dispensary partners. The living-room insight had traveled into a regulated sales network.
03 / Emergency mode becomes a capability
The business meets smoke, shutdowns and a pivot
The plan was tested by Northern California itself. Flooding and wildfires interrupted the young company. During the 2019 Kincade Fire, flames came within roughly 300 feet of Gore’s Healdsburg home. She and her family evacuated to Warner’s home in Petaluma. Power and gas shutdowns forced Garden Society to pause production for weeks.
The following year brought a different shock. When in-person commerce contracted, Gore and Warner revived a Sonoma and Napa delivery service they had previously stopped. They widened the menu with products from five other women-owned cannabis companies. It was a practical pivot and a revealing one: the same network Garden Society spoke about in its brand could become operating infrastructure when normal channels failed.
“We have had a lot of practice of what emergency mode looks like and what needs to happen.”Erin Gore, after successive disruptions
This period changed the texture of the company. A founder who begins as a product translator eventually becomes a risk manager. She has to know which functions can stop, which cannot, where cash is exposed and which relationships can absorb a sudden change. Gore’s large-company experience mattered, but the startup demanded improvisation at close range.
04 / Money with a point of view
Choosing the capital, then choosing the deal
Cannabis companies face an unusually narrow financing corridor. Federal restrictions limit familiar banking options, and women founders receive a small share of venture capital across industries. Gore has been blunt about both constraints. She has also described coming close to accepting a financing arrangement that could have gone badly before a business coach urged her to reconsider. Learning to refuse money became as important as learning to raise it.
In January 2022, Garden Society announced more than $7 million in Series A financing. The round included an oversubscribed $320,000 special-purpose vehicle led by Janna Meyrowitz Turner and composed of strategic women and BIPOC angel investors. It made the cap table another expression of the company’s stated values. Capital supplied fuel, but it also supplied relationships and future expectations.
Gore said the money would support growth plans. The company invested in manufacturing and worked toward additional state markets, including Ohio and New Jersey. Her later description of expansion is useful because it removes the romance: every state behaves differently. A product can keep its name while licensing, production, distribution and launch economics change underneath it.
The next strategic step arrived in February 2024. Garden Society acquired Chemistry, an Oakland craft brand founded by organic chemist Paul Roethle, in an all-equity deal. Chemistry added tinctures, cartridges and other categories, while Roethle joined Garden Society as vice president of product. Gore framed the fit around shared science, craft production and fidelity to the plant. It was the company’s first acquisition and a shift from building a single brand to managing a small portfolio.
“The acquisition enables Garden Society to scale its product lineup and reach a wider demographic.”Erin Gore, on the Chemistry deal
05 / The founder keeps changing
A company built around permission
Gore’s public work extends beyond products. She has spoken often about women in cannabis, mentored founders and advocated for a wider range of people to participate in the industry’s ownership and financing. The work matches the first insight from those crowded gatherings: people enter unfamiliar spaces when someone makes room for them.
Her language has always made space for friction. She talks about trial and error, imperfect decisions and getting back up. Asked about industry challenges in one interview, she laughed and answered, “What challenges haven’t we faced?” The joke carries an operator’s fatigue, but also an engineer’s acceptance that the system will continue producing new variables.
In 2025, Gore returned to the whole arc in two podcast conversations, one with Erica Lockheimer and another with Elizabeth Gore for Yahoo Finance’s The Big Idea. The title of the latter episode captured the problem neatly: entering a new industry means expecting to build some of the rules yourself.
Garden Society’s surface still communicates ease. Its history does not. It contains a corporate apprenticeship, a wine-country network, a kitchen full of friends, a co-founder with complementary skills, natural disasters, a retail pivot, a difficult capital market and a first acquisition. Gore’s contribution is the connective tissue. She took an intimate observation and kept translating it as the scale changed.
The original room remains the most useful image. Gore was measuring ingredients, but she was also measuring permission. She saw that a product could carry chemistry, ritual and belonging at once. A decade later, that small-room lesson still explains the company: build the rigorous system, then make the doorway feel human.