Video Staff
The Green Market Report had a chance to sit down with Leafly’s Dave Cotter at the recent MJ Biz Conference in Las Vegas Nevada.
Debra Borchardt: Leafly is known for its strain reviews and locating dispensaries. Now the company has an online eCommerce marketplace.
Dave Cotter: Leafly Market is an eCommerce site for purchasing the largest selection of CBD products. We just launched that and it’s really the beginning of us expanding from what we’ve done around news, what we’ve done with strains into a full marketplace for not only CBD but as a way for individuals to also get connected very easily to dispensary’s and the brands that they love.
So if you think of our portfolio from a product perspective, we have the consumer-facing piece, which is really kind of the news and our cannabis guide and content. You then have this marketplace piece, which is the eCommerce funnel. As you come out of learning about something, you find a product and you’re able to purchase it. And then we have this back-office suite and those are the tools that are used by a dispensary and you know, brands to help them run their business.
And as part of that suite, we make data available to them. And so we launched Leafly Insights, which is a data package that allows the dispensary, whether it’s a mom and pop or a large MSO, to understand that what strains are popular, what pricing you have happening in your area. And for a lot of those dispensary’s because they’re competing in very tight geographic areas. Understanding how much to charge, understanding what’s popular is super, super critical for them to remain competitive. And so we made that available and make that announcement today as well.
We announced our partnership with the American Marijuana Medical Physicians Association and it’s really the beginning of us working with them to really push the science forward as far as cannabis and the medical community. As part of that, we’ll be working on joint curriculum, so we’ll be coming out with different curriculum pieces for doctors. We also are making it easy for patients to be connected to doctors if they’re looking to cannabis or understanding what the cannabis do potentially for them. So it’s really, really exciting to be able to partner.
Debra Borchardt: Leafly felt that it was an organic move to provide eCommerce. The customers were already coming onto the website and reading about specific strains in dispensary’s or reading news about different products. They just naturally wanted to make purchases.
Dave Cotter: What we have done is really just kind of responded to where our customers are pulling us, which is now that I understand or now that I’m educated, I now want to buy something. And so we’re creating a platform that allows them to do so. And as part of that continuing to make certain that we’re giving, you know, really easy to use tools for our dispensary partners to help them better run their business. So it’s really an extension of what we’ve already done. And so we’re super excited to really, to kind of unveil a lot of it today.
We basically settled in the Seattle area we knew that we wanted to make our expansion and so, you know, we onboarded more developers in our Seattle office. We have an awesome team down in Austin and they were really the backbone for creating this new marketplace experience. And it’s been a really cool kind of addition I think to the Leafly culture. Because you’ve got, you know, individuals who are deep in investigative reporting. You have individuals who are really deep at the science and now you have this kind of software culture as well. And it’s a really cool kind of mix of professions all really striving for kind of a higher power and a bigger opportunity. So it’s been really, really fun.
