A growth marketer who decided the best funnel was a storefront on Woodbridge Avenue.
The word is anja. It is two things at once: a sly pun on ganja, the slang every adult in the room already knows, and an old Sanskrit word that means to manifest. Julio Casado liked that both meanings fit on a sign over a door in Highland Park, New Jersey.
He runs ANJA Life, the first adult-use cannabis dispensary the borough has ever had. He opened it in January 2024 with a doctor, a fashion-industry veteran, and a conditional license from the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission. The address is 225 Woodbridge Avenue. The Sanskrit, presumably, did its job.
Casado is also, separately, the founder and managing partner of Full Funnel Growth, a digital marketing agency he started in New York City. He spends weekdays helping e-commerce brands tighten their funnels and weekends watching real customers walk into a real store. Most marketers don't get to see both ends of that pipeline. He insists on it.
His path here is not a straight line. Cornell ILR. Deloitte and AXA. A stint at Success Academy where he helped open a middle school. A few years inside an agency. Then he started his own. Then he opened a dispensary. The connective thread, if you squint, is the same one Sanskrit chose for him. Manifest the thing.
If you wanted to draw the geography of Casado's life as an arrow, it would go south by southwest. From the Bronx to Metuchen, a quiet Middlesex County town, and then a five-minute drive over the border to Highland Park, where the store is. He calls the community diverse and progressive. He says the location was, in his words, a culturally nice fit. He is not the sort of operator who chose a market by looking at a heatmap. He looked at the sidewalk.
That instinct shows up in the way ANJA was launched. Instead of pouring the seed round into paid acquisition, the team threw a festival. Anjafest is a community gathering attached to the dispensary, with local cultivators, music, and the kind of programming that sounds less like a marketing tactic and more like a block party with a license. The fact that the CEO runs a growth marketing agency by day makes the choice more interesting, not less. He knows what the alternative looks like.
Full Funnel Growth is the older of his two companies. It is a NYC-based agency that engineers cohesive growth funnels for retailers across social, search, and retail media. The aesthetic of the agency is clean, modern, data-driven. The aesthetic of the dispensary is community-driven, education-first, and Sanskrit-named. Both are his. Neither cannibalizes the other.
There is a quiet logic to running both at once. The agency taught him how customer journeys actually break. The store gave him a place to fix one in real life, with shelves and door chimes and people who walk in nervous on a Tuesday afternoon.
It is the line in the resume that catches everyone. Before the dispensary, before the marketing agency, before the years at AXA and Deloitte, Casado was a Business Operations Manager at Success Academy Charter Schools, where he helped open a middle school. The work was budgets, logistics, hiring, the unglamorous scaffolding of a brand-new institution. The pattern, in retrospect, is consistent. He likes building things from a conditional permit to a working room full of people.
Casado did not start ANJA alone. The founding team includes Padmaja Malladi, a physician who serves as Chief Wellness Officer, and Migna Guzman, a former Liz Claiborne executive who handles the finances as CFO. A doctor, a fashion industry veteran, and a marketer. It reads like the setup to a joke and works like a balanced operating team. Each of them brings a discipline the cannabis industry tends to import only one at a time: clinical credibility, retail discipline, and growth literacy.
One of the things New Jersey's cannabis trade press has consistently pointed out about Casado is that he is Hispanic, which the reporters frame, accurately, as a far too rare occurrence in the state's licensed cannabis industry. ANJA is a state-certified Minority-Owned Business Enterprise. The certification is more than a sticker. It is, in practical terms, a piece of evidence in an industry whose equity promises have been uneven at best.
Casado has served as Treasurer on the Board of Directors of La Unidad Latina Foundation since 2014, which focuses on educational and civic empowerment in the Latino community. That work predates ANJA by almost a decade. It also predates Full Funnel Growth. Read the timeline carefully and a tendency becomes visible. He invests in institutions before he invests in himself.
The New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission approved ANJA's conditional license on October 27, 2022. The dispensary opened to the public in January 2024. That is fifteen months of municipal approvals, build-out, regulatory paperwork, supplier negotiations, hiring, and the kind of waiting that breaks lesser teams. Casado, asked about it once, said only: I'm happy to finally be here. We're doing a lot of work to get to the starting line.
The starting line is now well behind him. The store is open. Anjafest is on a calendar. The community is, by any reasonable measure, manifested.
If you read his public statements end-to-end, the word that recurs is equitable. He talks about creating an equitable and meaningful impact in the cannabis industry. He talks about education, trusted resources, and personal experience. These are not throwaway phrases for a press release. They are, in effect, the operating manual of a CEO who treats retail cannabis as a civic infrastructure problem dressed up as a consumer brand.
It is too early to know how big ANJA gets. Highland Park is a small borough. Woodbridge Avenue is a single address. But the founder is, by background and temperament, an operator who can scale things. He has the marketing engine in the next state over. He has the team. He has a name with two meanings. The rest is just shelves.
His undergraduate degree is Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell. The curriculum prepares people for HR departments, not cannabis cabinets. He took a left turn.
He moved out of the city to be closer to the store. The commute is part of the operating philosophy.
His agency is named for the customer journey. His dispensary is the part of the funnel where people actually pay.
He has been on La Unidad Latina Foundation's board longer than ANJA has existed as an LLC.
ANJA is a New Jersey-certified Minority-Owned Business Enterprise. In NJ cannabis, that puts him in a small club.
Cornell undergrad. Harvard Extension School graduate. The diploma wall does not match the product mix. He likes it that way.