The very first thing you will notice about Seaside Cannabis Co when you walk through the door is 100% how you’ll walk through the door. Anyone who’s visited even one dispensary anywhere knows the buzz and clang of the holding cell they feed you into (the proper nomenclature is “man trap”). What you’ll notice at Seaside is that it does NOT exist. And you may not realize it until you leave, or until you visit another dark and sharky marijuana shop, but that one absence is a tone setter.
Pillar One: Flower Market
What you’ll most likely notice next, of course (and by careful design) is the centerpiece of the shop - Cape Cod’s one and only Flower Market dead center smiling at you through lacquered live edge wooden teeth. Just as Murray’s Cheese puts the Persille du Malzieu or the Pecorino Tartuffello front and center to pull you in, or how any bar worth its salt baits your curiosity by featuring the Lalo Blanco (oh behave!), Seaside believes in the value of Bag Appeal and wants to be sure you can select, smell and, most importantly, examine the cannabis that appeals to you, before you buy it.
Don’t buy it by the potency, don’t shop by the numbers, inhale deeply through the nose, have a good long look through the magnifying glass, remember what 1993 felt like, trust your senses. This is Seaside’s greatest strength: the focus on your experience, on putting you at ease, on keeping you at there until you split.
Want to see sample 255 - the AM x PM? Not for you - what about 348 - Strawberry Candy? Take all the time you like - there’s at least one Budtender behind the counter all the time, ready to pop the lid and let you stick your snout in there. (Kindly keep your hands to yourself.) Even the folks who come in for edible or beverages only end up spending a little time at the bar looking over the stock.
Undecided? Check out one of Dave Dank’s. Named after a co-owners and one of the heroes of this story, Dave Currier, Dave’s Danks will often be a strain that maybe doesn’t have as high a THC percentage so is being moved by the grower at a lower cost than the other strains that do get into the red end of the meter reading as far as THC is concerned. So Seaside picks up these strains - which are as good any anything else they stock - and move that cost savings on to their customers. When you’re shopping more with your eyes and your nose and less by the numbers, you’ll find some golden nuggets deeper down in the crates. Dave’s Danks puts the flashlight on those for you.
Seaside’s dispensary is built on three distinct pillars. Those pillars support the weight of the most crucial element to the endeavor: the customer. The staff spends as much time with the customer as possible. They’re knowledgeable, they’re bought into the mission, they answer questions and anticipate needs, they not only look at data on where the industry is going, they farm their own through engagement and determine how trends are coming to bloom in the building. This is Weed 2.0.
But the Flower Market is just Pillar One.
•••
“We beat back Brewster twice, we beat back Mashpee - we did it because it was the right thing to do.” Spencer Knowles (co-owner of Seaside) recounted how he and some key proponents of the cause (lawyers, marketers, poli-sci activists) had gotten together to deal with the local puritanical forces that had reared their authoritarian heads when Massachusetts passed adult use legislation back in 2016.
Within six months, a handful of Cape towns clutched their collective pearls in unison and did their level best to pre-emptively band whatever they could. In that fury to ban weed retail businesses (dispensaries) they were sloppy and ended up filing to ban all license types for the entire industry. Spencer and some other heads got together to head it off at the pass.
They saw everything unfolding in slow motion like a car crash: these Cape towns were going to ban everything and as the ship slowly righted itself over years and through more voting and legislation etc, the MA Cannabis Industry’s growth was going to be stunted and suffer. That’s when about eight of them banned together and stepped into the fray to protect the people here who were going to enjoy the health benefits at risk if these restrictions passed.
This came to a head in Orleans in 2018 when Spencer and the Weedom Fighters went before the town to vote on allowing dispensaries. It was a public 50-50 vote and they needed a simple majority to make it happen. The motion fell 15 votes short of what they needed and, as a result, a two-year moratorium on the motion was put in place (see you again in 2020!). And If that wasn’t enough of a halt to progress - when the motion came back to the floor, they’d now need a super-majority to pass it: 66% of the votes.
The heat was most definitely on.
The Wholesaler Becomes The Ganjier, A Steward of the Plant
Spencer Knowles, one of the owners who was aboard the SS Cannabis Co when it almost sank in the infamous 50-50 private vote debacle of 2018, comes not only from Orleans and a family that’s had 50 years deep in the local business motel game but from the world of wine. Before he enlisted in the Cannabis game in 2018, Spencer was stocking wholesale wine stores in Florida and doing many of the same things he’s doing at Seaside.
He used to rep hundreds of brands of wine, now he reps hundreds of strains of cannabis. In Florida, he’d visit a wine warehouse with a mountain of knowledge about the product and spend his time educating the buyers there about the different varieties and making them comfortable with his knowledge to the point where they’d trust him about a brand they were unsure of. And his scope didn’t end there - he’d also need to help the stores set up so that when customer came into a 30,000 square foot space they weren’t so overwhelmed by the selection they clammed up and walked out backward.
Keep reading, this will start to sound familiar.
Pillar Two: Cold Beverages
The shop’s ownership (drawn heavily from the contingent fighting the town to regulate - 5 of the 8 activists), made a firm decision to go all-in on Day One - they wanted to be present and have the cannabis industry’s bleeding edge products available and out front from the jump. When that time came, it was clear they needed to be players in the THC-infused seltzer game - no sugar, no additives, natural flavors only.
Thanks to Trevor Wallace, White Claw was able to break through where Zima stalled out. By the time Cut Water and High Noon showed up on the scene, folks in the cannabis world had lightbulbs going off all over the place and they were making moves to reach the same audience with THC instead of booze. Right now, these infused seltzers account for 2-3% of the cannabis industry’s sales … but if you’re watching closely you’ll see that this is on pace (and projected) to hockey-stick in the next 8-10 years and start beginning in a lot more revenue as normalization and adoption happen.
For Seaside, which is already doing twice the industry average on seltzers, that adoption is welcomed with open arms and case & cases of product.
“Preparation is the key, it’s the most important thing.”
And Spencer doesn’t just mean possession of stock, he also means proper display refrigerators to move units and, maybe most importantly of all, it means storage. What’s the footprint for a package of 50 vape cartridges? How heavy are those to move around? How much can a business make selling those 50? Seltzers take up much more space, weigh exponentially more, and bring in substantially less revenue … right now.
But the view Seaside takes is that these drinks are built to suit a wide range of cannabis enthusiasts. They take the edge off, you can have one after dinner hanging out with the kids without burning flower or sucking on a little plastic rectangle and hiding the plumes of smoke. So Seaside not only brings non-infused seltzers to events for folks to sample and raise awareness about them, they keep a wide variety in-house at all times because this will eventually come home to roost and they’ll have played their part in bringing this to their customers early - keeping their customer-centric culture and approach at the tip of the spear and taking even more steps to build massive trust with their clientele in the process.
•••
By the time the two year moratorium found its way back around, Spencer & Co had enough of these draconian regs and pushback so, ahead of the impending vote and the odds staring back at them (if you can’t get 50% how likely is it you can clear 66%?), they went out and got a ringer. They needed a proven killer who had experience taking on the town and winning so … enter the Candlepin William Wallace himself, the man who Strikes fear into the heart of oppressive, power-hungry legislators everywhere (but especially in Orleans, MA), Dave “Hittem In The Mouth” Currier. He’s a hero to Goliath slayers and BBQ enthusiasts everywhere (but especially in Orleans, MA).
Dave joined the collective and, along with the genuine hearted effort from bunch of Orleans’ most concerned, geared up for the Big Vote in 2020 - which just happened to fall on Halloween. Luckily, the town was feeling generous and in a magnanimous gesture position this motion on the docket at the top of the meeting so the kids of parents who needed to vote didn’t have to wait too long to get to their once-a-year trick or treating adventure …
Of course that’s bullshit – the Town buried the motion at the bottom of the agenda. Dave’s daughter sat in the car - fully costumed - for six hours. Spencer ran sandwiches to voters so they’d stick around until the moment came. Well they didn’t get 66% of the vote - they racked up 76%. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that this time it was a private vote instead of a public one but nobody care how a victory gets into the Win column, only that one gets there. And this time, they got it there.
A major battle was won but yet the war. On to the next hill’: forming Seaside Cannabis Company and getting licensed to run a dispensary business. With the wind at their backs, fortune smiled on them and they were issued a Golden Ticket to start putting their plans together. One of the partners secured the building and had its interior stripped to the studs for reno.
After they fought back injunctions filed against them (by applicants for dispensary licenses who weren’t granted the rights), they were finally in the mode to meet in the raw space and start designing their dream dispensary from the ground up.
Pillar Three: Good Vibes
Good vibes are ultimately what drives Seaside at the center. Their focus on their customers over everything (or, rather, their focus on everything they do through the customer lens), is refracted throughout the shop. There is no clanging impersonal Man Trap, there’s the centerpiece Flower Market, the staff that ranges in age to reflect the customer base they serve … all of these touches are intentional and effective.
To ask if you’ve ever been to another dispensary that has not one but three READING AREAS sounds like a leading question so let’s skip it. But for real … education is a big part of the Seaside mission and it’s quite literally on full display.
Purpose Walls
Throughout the store, there are three separate walls dedicated to providing information to anyone who’s curious about what Seaside has distilled down to what’s more or less the essential usages:
- Relief & Recovery
- Happy & Fun
- Sleep & Relaxation
As they describe it on their site, this is “where our customers can learn which products could benefit their specific needs, and familiarize themselves with the store’s inventory. Each wall is a showcase of the outcome that particular cannabinoid profile category may offer.” There is enough info in there to pick up some new nug of information every time you walk through the door.
Take a book off the shelf and have a seat on the couch or the chair by the spring water and the vase of fresh flowers. Unlike most any of the shops you’ve visited, the walls are bright, the frosted windows white (by law, marijuana cannot be displayed so as to be seen from outside the dispensary), the place is flooded with natural light. It feels more like you’re waiting to see a doctor than buy some grass.
Education
With more than 50% of Orleans residents registering north of 65 years old (if it’s not the oldest town on the Cape, it’s the second oldest and that’ll probably flip next year), the calm environs and emphasis on The More You Know approach is exactly what they’re looking for. When folks who are new (or even just shy) come into a shop as open, well lit, and extensive as Seaside, it can overwhelm some folks and induce some anxiety (the irony not lost on Spencer who chuckles and acknowledges that most people come in to reduce anxiety). Having a ton of education at the ready lets shoppers get lost in the part of the store that isn’t concerned with bagging up transactions.
These shoppers have the time and the money to be deliberate - so they also have a lot of well considered questions. When a well learned & trained staff can spend the time answering meaningful questions in detail THEN walk someone over to a poster or a book that will elaborate on the premise and the context in any number of directions, Seaside really pulls away from the field of 450+ dispensaries in MA.
Then there’s the fact that a vast majority of customers who are over 40 years old will ask about getting a better night’s sleep. That’s why the Sleep & Relaxation wall are the most popular. Set off to the side by the Flower Market, this is where someone who’s there on a mission to use cannabis for more than simply pleasure may find answers to real rest.
CloneFest
Some other minerals in the marble that forms the Good Vibes pillar is Seaside’s partnership with Suncrafted Cannabis - lead by the uncle of a Seaside’s owners out of Middleboro, MA. In the same way that the Flower Market embraces the purchase of cannabis, CloneFest embraces the cultivation of cannabis. Suncrafted’s facility has a tissue culture lab where they can manually breed various strains.
Many, many dispensaries will throw a party for 420 right? At Seaside they take up a notch or seven. Many of the plants bred in Suncrafted are brought into the shop starting near the first weekend in May (when the danger of frost has passed) and put on display and different plants are sold each weekend in store over the next handful of weeks - until Father’s Day. They’d spoken to customers and crowd sourced the feedback that if folks aren’t in town that one weekend when a clone drops, they miss out.
So Seaside decided to pull farther away from their competition and create a series of drops to be sure anyone who wanted to try their hand at growing had the opportunity not only to pick up a plant or two and try but come in for themselves and speak to a rep from Suncrafted, ask their questions, feel good about their answers and go home with a flower plant that they stood a good chance at bridging to maturity. OR maybe a customer wanted to grow more than one strain … they could come back several times over the month and a half and pick up the plants that aligned with what their taste in cannabis is.
When you talk about putting the customer at the center of the business, absent going to their home and potting the plant for them, good luck finding a more user-friendly approach.
Experiential
Because the interior of the store is so distinct and the vision for the business so wide in breadth, it was easy to see that Team Seaside didn’t take their cues from other dispensaries. Turns out the inspiration for the shop’s interior vision didn’t come from a dispensary or from a 30,000 square foot wine shop but from a luxury cruise ship and a video tour of that ship by a VP of Experience laying out in glorious detail how the customer flow is designed to work.
This was an epiphany moment for Spencer and, while he and Dave invited their respective ladies to walk the store floor and choose colors and suggest design elements, Spencer took the lead from the video tour guide and combed that forward to inform the natural layout and pathing he’d give to his customers. When you drink the Customer is King Kool Aid, there’s nothing you won’t do.
Yes, we have one of the aforementioned ladies to thank for the central placement of the Flower Market, but the grand vision, the blueprinted plans pinned to the skeleton studs of the walls, was courtesy of Spencer’s 50,000 foot view of the business as a whole. This bird’s eye view yielded the Vendor Showcase: a wall by the registers where one of Seaside’s featured partners displays their merchandise. This is also what led to the placement and layout of the Purpose Walls and the Tree of Life, Suncrafted’s showpiece display by the Flower Market. Customer flow and thoughtful merchandising, coupled with a decision to go all-in on the shops product offering to give consumers what they want the way they want it has bred the massive success Seaside has experienced in their short run.
It’ll be a happy 2nd birthday when the solstice rolls around this upcoming first day of winter.
Goin Down the Road Feelin ... Pretty Good, Thanks
All of the effort the Seaside Cannabis Company Contingent has put in up until now has put them in a pole position for even greater success as the month turn into years. By putting their money on the table focusing on the customer, focusing on where the industry is going, and by being genuine proponents of the good that the cannabis industry has to offer, they’ve already decided they’re on the path of Delayed Gratification. They will reap the long term benefits and in the meantime tighten the belt and be stewards of good business habits.
Putting the right staff in place is just one step they take toward their ultimate goals of establishing a stable business on top of which they can build up and out … and maybe west down Speedway 6. They hire across age groups to reflect their customer base, they prioritize education for their customers, and that needs to come from the staff themselves, leading to an investment in time and money to bring them along. That technical knowledge about all aspects of the plants and the strains as well and understanding storage conditions and stock rotation, regulations on how inventory finds its way to the vault, or how the complex POS stations function can all be used down the line for employees who take their jobs seriously and will stay in this industry for the duration. This has led to lower turnover and a similar loyalty from their in-house crew that they’ve established with their regular patrons.
Around the corner there may be some manufacturing afoot - Seaside's location certainly has the space to accommodate. It's an embarassment of riches really: the minimum size for a dispensary to operate is 800 sq feet, just about the size of Seaside's storage vault. They've shown they have the Big Vision and can see the cup from 50,000 feet, so what comes next is likely to surprise and delight.
They’re consistently doing the right things and seeing wins - two things that rarely come from taking any kind of shortcuts or overnight sensation aspirations. There’s no magic wand for what they’re doing, what they’ve accomplished, or are on the path to build. But it’s worth a moment of acknowledgement, let’s raise our Visine to the Seaside heads.
