cannabis-retail
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John Oram Put a Lab Coat on California Cannabis - Then Built the Store Around It
Before California cannabis had a dependable rulebook, John Oram was buying used lab equipment and asking unfashionably precise questions. His next experiment was larger: turn quality control, manufacturing and retail into one coherent company.
Blake Marchand Put a Bar in a Dispensary - Then Let the Neighborhood Take a Seat
A real estate operator spent two years wrestling with permits, risked his savings, and turned a restaurant habit into March and Ash’s defining idea: make a complicated category feel like a place where people can linger, ask questions, and choose for themselves.
March and Ash Bet the Dispensary on a Flower Bar - and Made Cannabis Retail Feel Familiar
The San Diego chain borrowed its best idea from a restaurant bar, then refused to copy-paste it. Here is what operators can steal from a cannabis retailer built around browsing, local design and unusually patient service.
Happy Cabbage Sold Its Marketing Machine to Fix the $150,000 Problem Hiding on Dispensary Shelves
Cannabis shops do not usually run out of data. They run out of clean answers. Happy Cabbage bet that the sharper business is not sending another text - it is stopping cash from going stale in the stockroom.
The Cannabis Company Built Like a Grocery Aisle - and a Power Plant
Verano controls the journey from indoor grow room to dispensary counter. That makes it part farm, part factory, part retailer - and a revealing test of whether a national cannabis brand can be built one state at a time.
Lume Cannabis Co.
Lume built Michigan's biggest cannabis operation by refusing the industry's multistate script. Its bet is simpler and harder: own the plant, the factory, the shelf and the customer relationship - all inside one state.
NorCal Cannabis Company
NorCal Cannabis Company is a vertically integrated, seed-to-sale cannabis operator based in Northern California. Founded in 2014, it grew out of the region's long, pre-legalization cannabis culture into a licensed holding company spanning cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, a portfolio of consumer brands, and retail dispensaries. The company scaled revenue from roughly $2M to over $70M in a few years and raised more than $50M in capital, positioning itself as one of California's more compliant, operationally mature cannabis businesses.
Treez Inc.
Treez is an enterprise cloud commerce platform built for the cannabis retail industry, bundling point of sale (SellTreez), cashless payments (TreezPay), inventory and compliance, retail analytics, ecommerce, and loyalty into a single system. Founded in 2016, the company powers over 600 dispensary locations, processes more than $5 billion in annualized transactions, and is used by an estimated 15% of the U.S. retail cannabis market.
Andrew Duffy
Andrew Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of SparkPlug, a San Francisco software company that pays frontline retail and restaurant workers cash bonuses for the sales they actually drive. A behavioral-science nerd from Harvard who put in time at Bridgewater Associates and built a luxury whole-leaf tea brand before this, Duffy turned a teenage hot streak selling margaritas into a venture-backed platform that has routed millions of dollars in supplemental income to hourly employees and raised $11.5 million to keep going.
John Yang
John Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Treez Inc., the enterprise cannabis retail commerce platform he built from a single dispensary's pain point into a company processing over $4 billion in annual transactions across 600+ retail locations. A Shanghai-born, Reno-raised technologist who grew up troubleshooting computers in his father's shop, Yang applied a decade of Fortune 500 consulting experience to one of America's most underserved retail sectors, raising $76.7M in funding and turning Treez into the backbone of cannabis retail operations in over a dozen states.