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for Ross right now. He's in first place Ross Rebagliati.
Ross' gold medal run. Ross Rebagliati has tested positive for passive marijuana. Forced to forfeit his gold medal. Returns the medal and diploma awarded to the F.F. Rebagliati.
They put me in jail in Japan. I just wanted to take the control back again. Let's turn this mess into a success. I'd love if we could be part of normalizing cannabis use and also stand up for the people who use cannabis. It's personal. I'm Ross Rebagliati and this is the Podcast.
Welcome to the podcast with Ross Rebagliati, where we explore the world of cannabis through the eyes of one of the world's premier cannabis advocates.
I've been at the forefront of cannabis awareness for over 25 years since that fateful day in Nagano. Join me as we dig deep for gold nuggets hidden in the wide world of weed. Its growers, producers, innovators, and enthusiasts. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and keep the podcast in your rotation.
If you're a cannabis enthusiast, know buying weed has changed drastically since legalization.
When I started buying weed was around 1990 and it was weed. There was no strains. It was green. It smelled like weed. It looked like weed. And so you would just buy it. And I didn't know anything about it. I'd never seen a weed plant before. Gone are the days of meeting up in a secret location and trading a crisp $20 bill for whatever your dealer had to offer. No questions asked. Today you can walk into one of several stores on the block and trade your money for the cannabis product of your choice. The problem is there's almost too much choice. If you don't know where to start, it's a little overwhelming.
That's why this podcast is dedicated to the people on the front lines of cannabis retail. The ones there to guide you on your journey into legal cannabis and help you find the best weed for your needs. It's all about the almighty Budtender. We'll talk to Cameron Csaszar, a passionate Budtender based in London, Ontario, on why budtending really comes down to asking the right questions.
So clap my hands together and go, what can we get for you today? Depending on that information, I will follow up with are you looking for Indica, Sativa? I'll ask them if they know the difference, if they're unsure.
And we'll talk to Jamie Lipowitz, founder of High Buds Club, an exclusive club for budtenders focused on bridging the gap between cannabis brands and the people selling their products.
And I had this literally like in a cartoon, this light bulb moment of, my God, the Budtenders is the most valuable part of a funnel.
I'm Don Shafer.
And I'm Ross Rebagliati. And this is the podcast.
This episode was inspired by the Black Diamond Stick by Ross's Gold. Infuse your joint or pre-roll with extra THC without clogging or canoeing like other infused pre-rolls. Just insert the black diamond stick in the middle of your joint or pre-roll, spark it, and you're good to go. Ask your favorite budtender for the black diamond stick by Ross's Gold. Or visit HerbalDispatch.com. and don't forget your ID.
And now for the pot news. When you shop for cannabis flower, you might ask your budtender for a particular strain. Maybe it's Sour Diesel or Bubba Kush for example. But did you know the word strain is not technically the correct term? The technical term for Sour Diesel, Bubba Kush, or whatever name is attached to the flower you love, is actually a cannabis cultivar. While a strain, it's a subtype of a biological species. Just like there are many different cultivars of tomatoes with their own unique shapes and flavors, there are just as many different cultivars of cannabis.
That's not the only similarity between cannabis plants and other consumable plants like fruits and vegetables. Many contain hydrocarbon compounds called terpenes. Terpenes are responsible for strong odors and flavors. For example, the lemony flavor of lemons can be attributed to a terpene called limonene. This terpene is also present in cannabis and imparts the citrusy flavor you might notice when consuming it. Cannabis contains more than 150 different terpenes and each cultivar has its own unique combination that creates a distinct flavor.
What exactly is a budtender? Merriam-Webster officially recognized the term in 2018, but its use goes way back to the 90s. It's a combination of two words, bud, referring to the psychoactive flower we all know and love, and bartender, and we don't have to explain that one. So a budtender is someone who serves you cannabis at the retail level. But not all budtenders are created equal.
Good ones have deep product knowledge and passion for cannabis that really makes a difference in creating a great customer experience.
My name is Cameron James Csaszar and I'm a budtender slash key holder at High Cannabis in Mount Bridges.
For Cameron, delivering great customer service comes down to asking the right questions, after seeing some ID of course.
We have a lot of customers that I would say are privy to cannabis and we'll use the right words but if I haven't met them, they will come in and they wait behind the rope and I'll go. And if I determine that they are under 30, I have to ask for their ID. I will check it. And then, you know, I'll typically ask questions along. What are you looking for today? And they might say a category specifically. They might say pre-rolls. They might say flour. I'll ask them if they're looking for like infused products or non. A lot of the times, if the customer has a general idea, they'll give you all that information and you just have to put the puzzle together, right?
Nice.
I try to be very, very nice. like to joke around with them. I like to keep it serious, but not like overtly serious where it's like, this is a drug deal. You ask them a bunch of questions and you gauge their familiarity with cannabis and then go from there. If they're like trying edibles, it's like, how much do you normally take? Do you cut them? But as they give you those preliminary questions, it starts to narrow your choices more and more.
These kinds of questions really matter especially when it comes to edibles, which often contain cannabinoids, which have different effects than THC.
One of the things that I like is this product made by Pearls. And I have no affiliation with Pearls at all whatsoever. This is just a personal preference, but I love their CBG Pearls that they have. And I love the CBG and I always love to hear what the budtender thinks of CBG also, because it seems to be like one of those concentrates that you don't hear very much about. The minor cannabinoids are really fascinating to me. To preface, I believe in genuine cannabis and manufactured cannabis products. I think they fill niches in the market, but I think it's important that you're able to recognize them. I know certain brands will either isolate CBC or CBG and stuff like that. Spinach will use a fermentation process with yeast where they will take a sample of the minor cannabinoid and that yeast will breed the minor cannabinoid and then they will isolate it further and then infuse it into their products. It's very interesting and it sounds vaguely scary to people that might not understand, but for me it's just like gastronomy in like the food world where it's something that gets really, really focused and developed and then put into the market.
wow.
There's lots of different conversations you can have about it.
Still, some people walk into a cannabis shop with only one thing on their mind.
If a guy says, I'm just looking to get really high, you might ask them some preliminary questions if they've tried something infused, what they normally consume. Maybe if he's gassing himself up and you give him the 50 % infused pre-roll, you don't want him to have a negative experience, right? It's all different for each individual consumer. They also might think that they want to get super high, but may not have ever been super high before.
And think that they're, I can handle whatever, but maybe they're still kind of climbing that tolerance ladder.
Absolutely. They've had the 25 % weed and that was super high for them. They think they're gangbusters and they can handle anything now. You know, you don't want to set them up with like a 200 milligram edible, you know, if the most that they've ever taken is 50 milligrams.
Absolutely.
Thankfully, a customer likely wouldn't be set up with a 200 milligram edible at a legal cannabis store since the maximum allowed edible potency per piece in Canada is only 10 milligrams. Still, 10 milligrams can be a lot for a new user.
And it's nice to hear that you like to joke around a little bit because I find it to be slightly nerve wracking walking into a dispensary. It's kind of like the essence of weed itself is not hanging out with a bunch of people you don't know, right? So when you walk into a store, first of all, it's nice to know your budtender. It makes that whole experience way more fun and acceptable. But if you're walking into a new store, they don't know you, you don't know them. There's always that little bit of tension around the fact that you might be baked or you might not be and you wish you were or whatever. But yeah, no, it's nice to have that icebreaker.
Totally. like, I would say like I build customer relations very well with my job. There are lots of customers that specifically like interacting with me. They specifically ask for me.
You're the man, Cameron.
I appreciate that. appreciate that. Building those customer relations is, you're right, super, super important because it cuts down on the tension.
I like to be left alone for like the first minute. I like to look around at the store and see what the store is like and then figure out or try to remember why I came in again and what I was looking for. But at some point I'm going to want to interact.
Yeah. You absolutely vibe check the customer. Absolutely. And the customer vibe checks the area. Totally a vibe check.
Now that the vibes have been checked, let's take a trip backwards through the cannabis sales funnel before the customer makes their purchase.
For me, as a guy with a weed brand, I wanted to know what's the best way for me to educate budtenders on the benefits of my product. How can I use my marketing dollars wisely? High Buds Club might be the answer.
My name is Jamie Lipowitz. I am the founder of High Buds Club. High Buds Club is a community for budtenders. We work with cannabis brands to create marketing and advertising programs to connect to budtenders in order to win their mind share at retail.
We wanted to talk to Jamie because it's clear she knows a thing or two about marketing cannabis brands and the story of how she got here is pretty wild.
It's like sometimes I tell the story and I lived it and it doesn't seem like it's real, but it's real. I have wanted to be an entrepreneur as long as I can remember. In 2018, when it was clear that cannabis was going to be legalized, I was working in marketing and advertising and I sold a program to Canopy Growth. And through that program, I was with Canopy in Montreal in May of 2018 at a conference. And I met Snoop Dogg's manager and business partner.
Clearly impressed by Jamie's experience and entrepreneurial spirit, Snoop's manager offered her a job at Merry Jane, Snoop's cannabis focused digital media platform.
I started at Merry Jane the week of legalization.
I got access to a lot of rooms. I got access to canopy growth thinking, global thinking of where the business was going and what was gonna be important. I got access to Snoop's lawyers and the best teams to be able to decipher the Cannabis Act and play within the regulations. And when you're on Snoop's team, I've learned in weed, everybody wants to talk to you and everybody answers your phone calls.
I was in California, I was in LA with the Canopy team and we were taking them on a market tour, showing them what was coming to Canada and what retail could potentially look like. And I was in Venice Beach and I went to buy a vape pen in a dispensary. I've been bullish on All-in-One since the beginning, so it was an All-in-One.
For any listeners out there who don't know, an All-in-One is a combination vape cartridge and battery and they're all the rage right now, mainly for the convenience of not having to buy two separate pieces.
I like the packaging. And the budtender said to me when I picked it, I would actually recommend this one because the oil tastes better and the battery lasts longer. I never would have picked this, but I did because the budtender told me to. And I had this literally like in a cartoon, this light bulb moment of, my God, the Budtender is the most valuable part of a funnel. And brands, the way I looked at it, brands were gonna spend all of this money on the top of the funnel. They were gonna try to win customers and get them to buy their product. They would drive them into retail and all it took was the Budtender to say, don't buy this, buy that. The Budtender is the most powerful part of the funnel and quite frankly, nothing above it exists.
And with that, the High Buds Club was born. It's an online platform where Budtenders and cannabis retailers gain access to product education opportunities, product sampling, and cannabis camaraderie.
As of February 2024, Health Canada allows licensed producers to provide product samples to provincially licensed cannabis retailers and their employees. Sampling is super important for Canada's brands. If you think about it, it's a lot easier for a budtender to sell something when they've actually had a chance to try it. And if you're the one in charge of purchasing inventory for your store, it's less risky making those decisions when you know exactly what you're buying. But sampling can be very expensive, especially for smaller operations like mine. So having a solution like High Buds Club is really appealing because it combines targeted sampling with product education and measurement of ROI return on investment.
But High Buds Club is not just a place where brands have a chance to sample and educate budtenders. Membership has its benefits.
So it was always really important to me that the benefit of High Buds Club not be free weed. And so I always think of the platform as a choose your own adventure. We give you access to a community of people and what I think of as a third space and we give you the ability to learn, to share, and to grow in your career. That manifests through online education as well as product experiences, but I have found it very important not to lead with if you join the club, you get free weed because the intention then isn't right. It really works if you have the belief of all ships rise with the tide.
It's really about being able to grow the industry, have a voice, and share your experiences because that's the only way we're all going to get better.
The benefits of High Buds Club membership sound great for Budtenders, but I had to know more about how a brand like mine could connect in a meaningful way with this community. So I asked Jamie to take us down the path from brand and product awareness down to a recommendation from the Budtender.
What a lot of people may not recognize is we have an owned platform that we call the HBC Feed, where a lot of our programming lives and where the budtenders engage. I would say that the root and the heart of everything we do is grounded in our newsfeed and our group chats.
And so when we talk about awareness, it's a lot of, if you know, you know, product drops. It's a lot of seeding information to the members and having them talk to each other about it so that they're able to spread the word and get awareness going just simply of the product existing.
Knowing a product exists is important, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. Budtenders also need to know why they should recommend it to a customer. Maybe it's got a unique flavor profile, higher minor cannabinoid content, or perhaps it was lovingly handcrafted by a small team of passionate growers. You know, things other than how much THC the product may contain. That's where the second piece of the puzzle comes in.
The second layer to that is around reason to believe and product education. So that manifests through education modules, live education sessions. And again, I go back to the group chat because the group chat really is the thing that moves the information from Budtender to Budtender and gets the conversation going. And so they learn quite a bit from each other.
Now that they've been educated on the why, it's time to experience the product for themselves. High Buds Club also measures sentiment around the product before and after trial. And then the third piece around the willingness to recommend is anchored in trial, but it's also anchored in data.
So we survey before we ever give any sample experiences. We always have a baseline of information that we're working from in which the bud tenders have told us about their experiences, any of their preconceived notions, anything there. Then we deliver them a brand experience, get them to understand the product and how to sell it, double down on a product experience. And then they talk to each other about it and you see it all over the internet. And so I've developed a really interesting formula, but it's all powered by the High Buds Club Bead, which also I think is really powerful because it's not meta, right? There's no shadow banning.
Folks in the cannabis industry know that social media giants like Meta are not too keen on cannabis related content. They allow it to a certain extent, but accounts are often deleted or shadow banned, meaning their content is effectively muted without warning for mentioning too many cannabis-related terms. But there's no risk of being deleted or banned on the High Buds Club feed.
It's a true social media platform for budtenders where they're able to learn from each other. And that to me is the X factor. The chats and the learning from each other, I go back to what we stand for, like to learn, share and grow together. That's a true, true like win-win situation.
It sounds like a must have for a budtender to be part of the High Buds Club. It would seem to me like if I was a budtender that you you would want to know what the next cool thing is or who's dropping what, when and where. Yeah, that sounds like something that I would definitely want to have in my back pocket.
When it comes to brands making a strong impression on budtenders and consumers, storytelling also plays a big part in breaking through the sea of options.
I think cannabis brands have to really figure out who they are. I don't think many of them know who they are or why they exist. And I think they think that their value is like cheapest weed for highest THC or that's the sort of thing that matters. And the brands that are the ones that stand out and are able to really communicate understand who they are. They understand why they exist. They understand why their products are different and who they are for. And they're able to synthesize that down into bite-sized communications that are easily understood and able to be regurgitated by a budtender.
I've always felt like a strong backstory is what makes a brand. And some have more of a story than others too. Like some brands come from a growing background or a legacy background in growing. Other brands are simply literally brands that are just purchasing cannabis and putting their name on it from other producers and getting it out there. But they also still might have a great backstory like Tommy's Choice, for example. Tommy Chong's got a great backstory and he doesn't have time to grow weed in a facility.
You may remember we spoke with the legend himself, Tommy Chong, on a previous episode of the podcast.
Cannabis is my direct connection to God. And when you have that open mind, be careful what you ask for. And that's why my next evolution is going to be mind blowing because it's not just mine. It's the big guys and he's got a lot of pull.
So he buys cannabis from craft producers and I do the same thing and it's evolving as well. think the brands are going to be like the main players moving forward.
Yeah. I mean, we saw it at legalization, right? I remember these big LPs saying they were gonna be the Coca Cola of weed. And then I think they lost the plot and forgot that branding is about storytelling. And if you're just putting weed in a bag and it has like some nice colors and a logo and like a dangler at retail, like that's not a brand. A brand is supposed to make you feel something and so the best brands do. And so I'm seeing a lot of LPs I've heard complain over and over and over again. There's no opportunities in this industry for marketing. I can't buy a billboard. I can't do this. But there's so many avenues if you think about it creatively and outside the box. There are so many ways to be able to deliver brand messaging and make a Bud Tender feel something that has nothing to do with giving away a free product.
Remember our friend Cameron, the Budtender we chatted with earlier in this episode? Being a High Buds club member has certainly made him feel something.
It's like having a bunch of people at your back. It's like having a bunch of people that are happy to support you no matter what and it's such a friendly community. All you have to do is be nice. It's given me a lot of opportunity with this job, here I am now because of the High Buds Club. A lot of education as well, because High Buds Club will host product knowledge sessions with different brands when they send out their flights. And being able to not only have like a conversation with a brand representative, but also have a product shipped to your door to try and then have that knowledge to then sell the product if you have it in your store, invaluable.
Thanks to Cameron Csaszar and Jamie Lipowitz for joining us on this episode of the podcast. Nice to know that these people like you working hard to make the cannabis buying experience a little less intimidating for everyone.
This episode was inspired by the Black Diamond Stick by Ross's Gold. The easy way to infuse your joint or pre-roll with extra THC. Ask your favorite bud tender for it. Or visit HerbalDispatch.com and don't forget your ID.
Join us for the next episode of the Potcast where we'll be getting into more of my personal backstory, including my past life as an Olympian and my current life as a cannabis advocate and entrepreneur. Let's get to know each other. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it.
The Podcast with Ross Rebagliati is an Everything Podcasts production. The opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the podcast team or our partners. The show is intended for a 19 plus audience.
Thanks to our host Ross Rebagliati, showrunner Rithu Jagannath, our writers Jessica Grajczyk, and our sound engineer is John Masecar. I'm Don Shafer, thanks for listening to Podcast. Another Everything Podcast production. Visit everythingpodcast.com, a division of Pattison Media. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.