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Arizona-based Timeless Refinery, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2023, is a self-funded multi-state lifestyle house of brands that owes its longevity to creating and sustaining a local following in every market it enters. As explained by President Josh Hirschey, who joined the company in 2019, this almost impossible task was made possible because of the founders’ ability to pivot when necessary while maintaining an almost obsessive focus on quality and control. These skill sets combined with quality products that resonate with customers has resulted in a longevity that has escaped many cannabis companies, and put Timeless on a path to become one of the industry’s few legitimate national brands.
Hirschey, who recently took part in a Deep Roots webcast with host Erik Ott, recounted for Cannabis Business Executive the Timeless on-ramp into the cannabis industry all those years ago. “Two of my business partners at Timeless started originally in 2010 as a lifestyle streetwear clothing brand,” he said. “They had a screen-printing shop in Tempe, Arizona, which is over by the Arizona State campus, and they were screen printing shirts and hats for Timeless, and for some other streetwear brands. They then opened a shop they called Timeless, right on the ASU campus, where they did early resale of streetwear, stuff like Supreme, long before resale was big.”
In 2012, medical cannabis was legalized in Arizona, and Timeless began the process of adding cannabis to the menu. “I had grown up with Rocky, one of the Timeless founders, and we knew some guys that were doing really early extraction out of the Pacific Northwest, Washington and Oregon,” recalled Hirschey. “They came down and showed us how to do it, my two partner saw that there was a real opportunity in it, and so we learned how to do early extraction – open blasting and emptying out e-cigarettes and putting the crude oil in the e-cigarettes. It was very rudimentary compared with today, but nobody had really even seen a vape. We believe we were one of the first vapes in the country. The local shops that got started here in Arizona were looking for products to put on the shelf, so it was a good product-market fit, and something we believed would be a big long-term opportunity.”
That was an understatement. “2013 is when we really launched, getting this very rudimentary product out into the market, a really early vape, and over the next number of years we learned how to do distillation, and we were CCell’s first customer in the United States.” CCell is the China-based producer of portable vapes notable for their innovative ceramic heating element.
Timeless met CCell around 2016, according to Hirschey. “It was a big risk at the time,” he said of their adoption of CCell. “We were using wick-based carts, paying maybe 50-60 cents a cart, and they showed us this ceramic cart that was about triple the price. But my two partners were like, ‘Wow, this is such a better consumer experience.” At the time we had a 10 percent failure rate, and we said, ‘If you can get this below a one [percent failure rate], it more than pays for itself from an experience standpoint and for us.’
“When we say failure,” he added, “it means not making it to the dispensary, but even worse, making it to the dispensaries and then out to the consumer and having that failure where they’re coming back to the dispensary and saying, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work, we need to trade it in.’ We would have a policy where we go pick up from the dispensaries, and we still do have this policy. It’s just so minimal now compared to where it was before.”
Their process of extraction improved as well. “At first, it was Co2 extraction, and then we learned distillation, but the thing that was always the vision for the company from that streetwear side is how do you engage that consumer,” explained Hirschey. “You’ve got to have a good quality product to have a good brand, but once you have a good quality product, which we worked on over the years, how do you engage that consumer? And from very early on a lot of that came out of that streetwear world. Why did people pick Supreme, or why did people pick Jordan? Because they identify with the brand, and they like what the brand is about, and it’s a part of their culture and community. So, for us, growing up here in Arizona, it was, ‘We want to make this brand feel like that local community brand that’s tied into the culture of Arizona, that’s collabing with local artists, that’s collabing with local restaurateurs.”
The template was set. “Early on, we took a lot of that streetwear marketing and put it into the cannabis brand,” said Hirschey. “When we first started doing it, a lot of the dispensaries asked us, ‘Why are you wasting your money on marketing? As soon as you drop off the pens, they’re gone, so you don’t really need to do this.’ But the mission was always that it takes time, authenticity, and consistency to build a brand that people are loyal to, and you either start that and build it over time, or, when it becomes competitive at some point, if you haven’t built that loyalty it becomes a price game. So, we really stuck to that early on and stayed true to it. We wanted to be that local, cool cultural brand that’s part of the community and part of all the different fun things that make Arizona great. And that allowed us to build a really strong position and be a leading brand here in Arizona over the first eight or nine years we were in the market.”
As the years have shown, success in cannabis does not always breed more success, but Timeless had good fortune and more on its side. “Looking back now,” said Hirschey, “a lot of it was luck more than strategy. Timeless originally launched with other products in addition to vapes, like various concentrates, but they were bootstrapping the company, and they said, ‘We need to focus on one thing and be as good as we can at that.’ At the time, vape felt like it was something that was going to be a bigger category, and something that was unique that they could position well with. So, through luck and necessity, it was a required focus, and over the years we have more and more defined that as a characteristic of the company. How do we remain focused and not try to be everything to everybody but try to be as good as we can be at certain things? We could make all this stuff, but are we going to be spread too thin as a self-funded business? How do we make sure we have one thing that can be the engine? Ultimately, as that grew, it commanded more and more attention, and it forced the focus, and then in the long term we really struck by the focus, which has been something that’s made us successful.
“In cannabis,” he added, “it’s easy to become unfocused because of the nature of the licenses and the nature of the business and the nature of the opportunity. But we can always come back to you and say, ‘We want to make sure we’ve done as good a job as we can with a specific thing before trying to do something else or spreading ourselves too thing.’ That started early on with, ‘Let’s pick one horse and do the best we can with it so we can keep the company alive and survive.’”
National Brand, Local Feel
The road to multi-state status came in about 2019. “We started looking at how to grow and we narrowed it to two ways,” said Hirschey. “One is we have this vape product and brand and a marketing playbook behind it that we think works: a national brand but local feel, community, and cultural engagement. So, how do we grow that? We had a big market share in Arizona at the time, and obviously still are a leader out here. I said, ‘If we’re going to this, and this is something we believe in, we need to start launching in new states,’ so that was the strategy. One, let’s take the Timeless brand and product and playbook and bring it out to new states, and two, let’s incubate new brands or products and SKUs in Arizona, where we have great consumer loyalty and great distribution. So, we did both.”
Expansion has been relatively rapid. “Now we’re in five markets, and we’re hoping to launch three more in the first couple months of this year,” said Hirschey, who noted they also went through that with the brands. “Because you can only do so much, you want to make sure what you are doing is successful before you start trying to do the next thing, and we had taken a step back to said, ‘Let’s find products, categories, and brands that we can build that fit our audience, that we can scale and create value, and also that we can put our marketing and our time and our capital behind to make successful.
“It ended up being vapes for us and then infused prerolls,” he added. “We have a product called Tumble by Timeless, and we think we have a real opportunity with infused prerolls that ties-in well with our vape. From a flavoring profile, we can use our flavors that people love in Timeless and tie them together. We have good sourcing capabilities, we have a good product, and we can brand it to target the same consumer that consumes Timeless. It all goes back to the focus. Yes, we look out there and see all these other categories we can be successful at, but is the opportunity we’re missing going to distract us from our core competencies to the point where we can’t be best in class? We’re constantly reevaluating that.”
Another consideration is the amount of onramp needed to develop and introduce a new product. “You bring up a great point,” said Hirschey. “Vape is a category where we’ve built a great reputation, so how do we expand within vape, and there’s a good, better, best model. We believe that we have a great product in Timeless, which is our botanical terpene line. We believe, like everybody says, that botanical terpenes are still the workhorse of the industry. It’s still 70-plus percent even in very mature markets like California. So, we can have a lot of fun with the flavoring profiles that people love and that we’re known for, like Cactus Chiller and Lemon Faderade, fun flavors that people can gravitate towards.
“That’s our work horse,” he continued, “but we also want to have options for different consumers. So, in 2020, we launched Noir, which is our live resin terpene. It was our first foray into something that’s more for that cannabis connoisseur that wants the flavor profile of flower and the effect flow of alpha flower. But we were very careful moving into that because we wanted to make sure we could scale it, and we found a way. Because the live resin terpenes from California didn’t have THC, they could be shipped to multiple states. But we also wanted to still be CPGish, so that if you love Timeless and Timeless Noir you can get the same experience in every state we’re in, and the partners that we found for that allowed us to provide that.”
More brands were to come. “Then we launched Azul, which we’d been talking about for a couple of years,” said Hirschey. “We felt that to have a great end product with solventless, it’s really important to have great quality flower that you can wash. And in markets where we had limited product availability, like Arizona, we were looking at whether we could build something that could scale, where we can produce enough to meet consumer demand and also get a quality product, so that if we’re charging a premium people will feel like they’re getting a premium experience.
“Because we wanted to make sure we could check those boxes, we waited a significant period of time until we felt like there was a supply chain in this market that allowed us to launch a great product that we could consistently deliver to the consumer,” he added. “That’s the same thought we go into these other markets with. We enter every market with Timeless as our core product, something we know we can scale, and then we introduce new products very quickly after that, because we know we can scale in a CPG fashion.”
I asked Hirschey if they are fans of limited drops. “We are absolutely fans of that,” he answered. “A lot of the stuff we take is from the streetwear culture, which is like, ‘Hey, we’re going to drop a limited set of these exclusive Jordans, and you better get them before they’re gone.’ We’ve been doing that for years, where we have our core profile flavors, and then we will do these limited flavors, whether it’s gummy worms every year for Halloween, and the consumer now knows that if they love Timeless gummy worms, they have to get in and buy it at select dispensary partners for this period of time. It creates a lot of fun hype and a reason to drive consumers there to enter these dispensaries and find these unique drops.”
Adding New Markets
Timeless is currently in Arizona, California, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Ohio, and will soon be moving into Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois. With approximately 160 employees on the payroll, I wondered if that fluctuates much as they move into a new state. “We’re constantly growing and adding people,” said Hirschey. “We’re pretty methodical about how we enter a new market and when we add people in general. We are still self-funded, so we want to make sure we’re running an operationally efficient company while also putting our efforts and the capital behind them to create consumer engagement. We’re playing a long game, and we want to build long-term consumer loyalty and engagement with the brand.
“Typically,” he added, “when we started going into other states, we felt like, ‘We have this great playbook of how to bring the brand to life in a local community in an authentic way, tapping into the culture of that community. We’ve done it successfully here in Arizona, but we grew up here; we know Arizona. So, as we get to these new markets, how do we replicate this, and our strategy was to find a really great local leader in each market who grew up in that market and give them the playbook and coach them on the playbook, coach them on what worked, and let them go out and bring the playbook to life in a very authentic and local way in that market.”
It’s a playbook that cannot fail. “If we do a cool collab with a restauranteur here in Arizona, they might love how successful that was, and then we do a limited drop with that restauranteur, like we did with a great local restaurant here, which was a great hit,” said Hirschey. “We showed the other markets that so they can go find that local restauranteur that’s really hot in that market, and collaborate with them in a way that builds each other’s brands. We want to do everything authentically. With our artists program or any of these collabs we do, it’s a win-win for us and whoever we’re collabing with. We’re building both of our brands with people that actually like our product and we like their product or their art.”
How do they do that in states with many markets, like California? “Arizona is a unique state in that a lot of the population is in the Phoenix greater metro area,” said Hirschey in reply. “We have some other pockets, in Tucson and Flagstaff, but Phoenix is the majority area, and we had to adjust to that. We obviously built a great local brand in the Phoenix metro area where we came from, but then we realized, ‘We’re not doing as well in Tucson and Flagstaff.’ So, we had to put some time and effort in and do local stuff there. That was more amplified as we started going out to some of these other states, because most of them have multiple big cities. But we don’t have a cookie-cutter approach to anything. We want to adjust and look at each market individually and see what’s going to be right for that market.
“So far,” he continued, “we’ve felt that we can have a good local guy or gal leading the market, and then we have a local leader who we can build a team under to attack the different areas of that market. For example, Missouri has been a great success story for us and for the industry. We got there very early, right at the beginning of medical, knowing it was going to be a few years at least before rec. Missouri also had a very Arizona feel to it from the size of the state and the demographics. It had two big cities in St. Louis and Kansas City, and some other decent-sized cities, and we found a great local leader who was Kansas City-based and had come up through Kansas City, but had been all around the state, and could really dive deep into the Kansas City culture. That’s been a big success, and at the same time we found great local partners in St. Louis and made sure to build a team that was also focused on St. Louis. We’ve done really well in Kansas City, and we want to continue to support that market, and we also want to continue to grow the St. Louis side.
“And you nailed it with California,” he added. “It is the probably the most intense state because you have so many different markets and so many different demographics in each of the markets. We have one GM in California, and he’s done a great job building a team of people underneath him and throughout the state that can really attack each one of those areas locally. And we try to make sure we’re working with our great local dispensary partners to do fun activations that are authentic to those areas. But yeah, as the states get bigger, you definitely have subcultures within them, and we try to figure out how to tap into those and maybe find one or two that we can really build our base with and then keep expanding out from there.”
Brand Loyalty?
Considering the fact that Timeless is banking on consumer loyalty to its brand, I asked Hirschey is cannabis consumers are in fact brand loyal? Look, I think we’re biased,” he said. “We are a brand, and we believe we have strong consumer loyalty, and if we look over time, our loyalty in Arizona has been pretty consistent. The last time I was on the panel at Benzinga, I said that if you look at BDSA data or data from any of these companies, typically the top brand in every state is not the cheapest brand. I also feel like we’re very early in the game in cannabis, and you don’t have the longevity that you have in some of these other CPG industries. At the same time, you are seeing certain people that are consistent and authentic and part of the culture rise to the top, and you have people that are willing to pay a premium for a product they believe in, a brand they believe in, equality they believe in.
“You also have people that are willing to be in the middle and buy on price only and I think that’s going to be true of every industry including cannabis,” he added. “But at the end of the day, I don’t think we’re in a single market where the least expensive product or brand is the number one seller. There absolutely is a place for everybody in that consumer journey, but if people are willing to pay a premium for a product, they have to believe in the product, and they have to believe in the brand. There’s a loyalty there, and if you continue to see certain brands do very well in certain markets year over year, they must have created some kind of loyalty, because people are coming back and buying them.”
I also wondered how much of a premium the Timeless brands can demand. “In markets that we’ve been in longer and we are a leader, we have more elasticity on price premium to justify what we’ve done in the market, and what we continue to do to engage the consumer and create a great brand,” said Hirschey. “In the markets we’re entering, we always want to be right there with the highest brands in the state, so even in new states we enter, we’re not coming in on the low end. We’re going to be right there with the premium brands, but where we can be within that position among the premium brand group is going to depend on the time we put it into the market and the loyalty we’ve built.”
I said I’m not sure most people are necessarily loyal to a strain, but to the quality of the producer or grower, the trust they have developed over time in the people producing the product. “I agree 100 percent, responded Hirschey. “We strongly believe you cannot have a good brand without having a good quality product. First and foremost, if people don’t have a good quality experience with the product, they’re not going to want to come back. In one of our slides in our review deck, it says we’ve produced 10-11-12 million carts in the history of the company. If we didn’t have a great quality and a consistent quality, we would never would have got there, so we’re very proud of how we’ve been able to operationally create that quality and consistency.
“But I think once you have that quality product, it’s how do you differentiate, and that’s really about that consumer engagement,” he continued. “That’s the brand building, and it’s why you see Red Bull charge a premium over some of the other energy drinks, because they’re doing things that are fun and engaging that the consumer can get behind and say, ‘Hey, I’m proud to drink a Red Bull,’ or, ‘I’m proud to carry a Timeless vape cart.’ I think it starts with the quality and the consistency of the product, and then it goes into what are you doing to engage the consumer consistently and authentically and make them feel like they want to have that over something else, because they believe in the brand.”
That inexorably leads one to the question of quality and how to define it. Is it about consistency of experience or quality of experience, or both? “If they don’t have a quality experience, they’re not going to come back and give you the chance to show them that it’s a consistent quality,” said Hirschey. “So, out of the gate, you’ve got to have a quality experience. Like with the hardware, if they hit it and it hits well, and the product tastes great, and the effects are what they’re looking for, then they’re going to come back. I think the consistency gets back to something we’re all in cannabis for, which is that it’s very unique depending on the product category. Obviously, flower is a natural plant and much different from harvest to harvest. With the products that we’re doing, even our prerolls, I think we’re able to create more CPG around it. And what we’re absolutely trying to do is build CPG-type brands, and that’s where you have a consistent experience taste and effect-wise whether you’re smoking in Arizona, Missouri, or New Jersey. I described earlier the ways that we’re trying to accomplish that, but you also have the allowances and the supply chain differences that are unique to that market.
“With a distillate cartridge,” he continued, “you can create a much more consistent product state to state. We can say, this is the potency level that we’re going to make the oil, these are the exact blends that we’re going to make with the exact botanical terpenes, and you can get a very consistent experience in almost every state, assuming they don’t have potency caps or things like that. Whereas the more flower-based the product, the more you’re going to be at the mercy of what’s locally available. Our solventless product is not going to be the same, but what we can do is make sure that we are going out and sourcing the best quality we can find, and then also make sure we are quality checking it to make sure that the end product is still a great experience. If we drop a solventless in Arizona, it’s not going to be the same as what we drop the Missouri because it’s going to be from different growers, but as long as we’re working with the best growers and washing in the best way, you can create consistency in that way.”
I have been told that the quality of cannabis across the board is generally improving. If that is so, how does a quality brand maintain its superiority when general quality is improving over time, and competition is nipping at your heels?
“I definitely think quality is always improving,” said Hirschey, “so I think we have got to always be at the forefront of the newest hardware that’s coming out and working with the best cultivators in the state to make sure we’re getting the best flower. It’s looking at what you’re currently doing and seeing what else is out there. I also think this goes back to our fundamental belief that have to have a good quality product, but there are going to be other people with good quality products, so what are you doing over and above that to engage the consumer, and that’s event-based marketing, cool collabs, and working with a local pool of artists and the cool local restaurateurs, being a part of the community, and giving back.
“Is it just the quality of the product,” he added, “because I’m sure that there are a lot of shoe companies that would say, ‘Hey, our shoes are just as high quality as Jordans or Nike.’ But people are paying a huge premium for those names over Adidas shoes, because they believe that the brand is more than just the quality of the shoe. It’s also the brand itself.”
Loving the Lifestyle
A similar dynamic exists in the lifestyle space. Lots of cannabis companies ride on their lifestyle chops, so what makes one more authentic than another? “Yeah, that’s a great question,” replied Hirschey. “I think a lot of people say that they are lifestyle brands. And I think doing something once or twice that seems like part of a lifestyle brand – like dropping a merch line or doing an event somewhere, doing a collab with somebody – that’s part of it. But I also think doing it consistently and doing it authentically, that’s a differentiating factor than just saying, ‘Hey, we’re a lifestyle brand; we did a t-shirt,’ or ‘We put an ad in the paper and did this one-time collab with an artist.’ I think that’s a start, but consistency and authenticity is a huge differentiator in the lifestyle brands that are standing out.
“We don’t try to mimic anybody else,” he added. “We have an idea in our head how we want the brand to look and feel and where we want to get it, and we are constantly getting together and making sure that it’s staying in that authentic way for us. I think there are other people that have done great jobs of building lifestyle brands. Obviously, Cookies is the lifestyle brand that has touched a lot of different things where we’ve stayed more focused on CPG, but there are other brands out there, like Stiizy and Jeter, that have created huge brands that are lifestyle focused, though I don’t believe in necessarily the same way we’re doing it, or in the same consumer demographic, or in the same way we’re engaging that consumer.
“But absolutely,” he continued, “they’re doing something that touches the consumer mentality and makes them want to go buy those brands, and that’s why they build such big brands. I think at the end of the day we’re all forging our own path forward in a new space, but we’re doing it with the idea that we want to engage the consumer in a unique way and get them excited about the product and then be why they choose our product over others.”
I noted that the same can probably be said about celebrity brands. Most aren’t going to make it because people see through it, they know the quality’s not there, and the celebrity is not paying attention. “I agree,” said Hirschey. “I think the celebrity brands we have seen that seem to be on track to being successful are the ones where the celebrity is highly engaged in the brand, like it’s their lifestyle versus somebody gave them a check to put their name on it and show up for some pop-ups in stores and then you never hear from them again.
“Or there’s the ones that have been a passionate consumer for a long time before they started the brand, and their attitude is, ‘This is my baby, this is my company, and this is something I want to be successful with, and I’m all about it,’” he added. “Those seem to be the ones that are moving in the right direction, and whether they can control the quality and the consistency of the product is what is going to help make or break their success. But I think to start out, the ones that feel authentic are the ones that have the best chance of surviving, whether it’s a celebrity brand or any brand at all. To your point, the consumer can see through what’s going on and what’s not.”
Product on the Shelf
Authenticity aside, I was also curious how Timeless actually gets its products on shelves in new markets. What is its last mile process? “As you know, we don’t have the licenses,” said Hirschey. “We sublicense, but we absolutely are active in making sure that the product is being produced and delivered to the customer correctly. So, we’re highly engaged in that, and in most markets we do the last-mile delivery ourselves under our partner’s license. In that way, we can really control our destiny there.
“In some markets, like here in Arizona,” he continued, “a lot of the dispensaries are in a very consolidated area in Phoenix, so distribution was a no brainer, because we want to make the experience as good as possible from beginning to end. Obviously, consumer engagement is a priority for us, and what builds value is that the consumer wants to come in and get our product off the shelf. But we also want to be a great partner to our dispensary partners, and getting the product off the shelf is obviously a huge part of that. Getting people in their door to come find us is a huge part of being a great partner, but so is making sure you have the product delivered on time, that the supply chain is great and you’re easy to work with; all that stuff makes you a desirable partner and a good partner to them. We want to control as much as we can with our licensed partners, so we’re pretty active in those states about getting to that distribution point, the dispensaries.”
Does Timeless create relationships with retailers itself? “We are 100 percent working with the retailers,” said Hirschey. “We pride ourselves on building great relationships with those retailers and being that great partner, building that relationship, showing them the value that we can bring for them, and then proving it by getting it on the shelf and getting it off the shelf. And then as we go out and do that fun stuff and that cultural engagement in the community, tying them into that and having that drive back to them. When we had Santa Cruz’s 50th anniversary party in Santa Cruz this year, we partnered with a dispensary out there and had all kinds of fun stuff going on, including limited releases and deals going on that day, getting that community engagement, and then driving them back to the dispensary and having the dispensary be a part of it, We want to own that relationship, and integrate that value for them.
“And we’ve been fortunate to be able to build really strong relationships with a lot of the bigger operators and dispensary partners in the States we’re in and nationally,” he added. “Of course, there are also a lot of great local operators that we want to make sure we own. So, we spend a lot of time building relationships at the national level with the big national guys and with the local guys, and we have great local teams that work with both the national guys and the local guys to make sure the products are on the shelves.”
Have you ever had to pay for shelf space placement. “We’ve tried to stay away from that as much as we can,” replied Hirschey. “California was kind of the recipe for that and also the recipe for why it didn’t really work. The way we approach it with our partners is, ‘We’re going to spend money to get consumers. What’s more valuable, us writing you a check every month or to be on the shelf or us spending money in the community and on this cultural stuff and having you be a part of it?’ If we do a fun cool event – like the drive-in movie series we did here in Arizona – and have them be a part of it and have that drive back to them, at the end of the day I believe most retailers think there is much more value in getting that consumer in the door and creating that long-term relationship with them than in getting a fee. I think that’s short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, especially in California, where it’s been hard to survive for a lot of guys, but we’ve tried to stay away from that as much as we can.”
New States, New SKUs
As Timeless solidifies its position in its existing states, it is also preparing to enter three new states – Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois, though the exact timeframe remains to be seen. With the northernmost state, “We’re working on the facility right now, so it’s a little bit TBD, and we have to have the state sign off on everything, but we’re hoping in March or April,” said Hirschey.”
I was also curious about SKU-count in new and existing markets. “I haven’t really added them together, but each state has a manageable supply chain, and also enough of an offering so the consumer feels like they have lots of choices,” said Hirschey. “We look at the maturity of the market and consumer demand. When we launched in Ohio, we launched with three flavors and two of each SKU. Because it was a small medical market and we were new to the market, we wanted to be a little bit more focused with the consumer. We’ve expanded that out, and now we’re up to 12.
“Massachusetts is a more mature market,” he added, “so maybe we’ll start with six to nine SKUs, maybe a little bit more, because there is more consumer demand there already. From both an operational standpoint and a consumer standpoint, we want to start with enough to get the consumer excited, but not too much. We can manage it and then we can build it over time, but even in a mature market like Arizona, we don’t want to go crazy and have so many SKUs that we can’t supply them consistently or it’s confusing what’s out there. But we are constantly trying to manage the right SKU count for each product line each day.”
What about the number of stores they anticipate being in when they launch in Massachusetts? Do they have a guesstimate? “We don’t,” replied Hirschey. “We’ve talked to a lot of retailers out there. We have built great relationships with the MSOs, and so far they’ve been great because we’ve proven to them in places like Arizona, Ohio, and Missouri that we should be on the shelf. So, we feel strongly we can get on a lot of those shelves, and we also feel like the brand carries. We’ve proven ourselves to where a lot of the local operators will give us a chance.”
Every state has different requirements, he added. “In places like Massachusetts, with its three-store cap, you have a lot more operators than in New Jersey, where you have five MSOs that have a lot of the market,” he explained. “We could probably launch in a much bigger way, assuming, knock on wood, that everything goes well. We think we could probably start with 50 [stores] in Massachusetts, but they might surprise us, and our local guy might get 100. He grew up in Massachusetts and spent the first 25 years of his life there before he left to run Salesforce in California, so he knows how to get in a lot of doors.”
What about New Jersey and Illinois? “In New Jersey, we are partnering with somebody that has a built-out licensed facility already. All these things require state approvals, so we’re a little bit at the mercy of when the state gets back to us, and what they get back to us with, but New Jersey will probably move a little quicker because the facility is already approved by the state. We’re hoping for February or March on that one. Massachusetts and Illinois have taken a little longer than we thought they would because we’re taking facilities and then building them out to meet the code requirements of those state cannabis programs, so it’s taking a little bit longer to get feedback and make sure the state is happy with all the architectural drawings, and then you build, and then they come back and hopefully like what you built.
“We’re far along in that process and feeling pretty confident that that will also be ready in March or April. We think maybe within the first four months of the year we will be in New Jersey, and then Illinois and Massachusetts shortly thereafter. But the state could always come back and say we want you to add this or change that or do this and that.”
A Timeless Future
Whatever the cannabis future industry looks like in the future, there will probably still be individual markets, but what happens when Timeless is able to sell across state lines? “What we’re trying to build is a brand as a CPG company, and that’s when you can sell across the lines,” replied Hirschey. “Obviously, flower is a little bit different, so how all that plays out is going to be unique, but on the vape side, building a brand that consistently has the same quality state-by-state is much more manageable when you can make it in one location with one formula and one supply chain and ship it everywhere.
“In the meantime,” he continued, “you can do a lot of things that are built towards that time, which is what we’re trying to do, like build as much consistency in the product as we can, obviously having high quality in the brand, and having that same brand message in each place. And that local feel and touch is always going to be there in our opinion, because all good brands do a good job of being national but feeling local, doing fun, cool local things in each market, and being part of that community in each market.
“Part of the fun for us was building the brand with people that we knew and places that we grew up with in Arizona, local fashion shops or streetwear shops, restaurateurs that we knew and grew up with, and then watching our teams do it in these other markets and seeing how much cool culture there is in Kansas City, St. Louis, and throughout California and Ohio, and Oklahoma. All these markets have fun, local cool culture, and part of the fun for us is to go out and find these people that bring new life to the brand.”
Will Timeless explore other form factors when the time is right? “Absolutely,” replied Hirschey. “As we get bigger and get more distribution, and we continue to grow as a company, looking at new categories is absolutely in our scope. For us, it’s let’s do one at a time, then block and tackle a category, then really make sure we’ve done a good job of putting the muscle behind building a brand in that category, and then we move on to the next.
“I think the infused prerolls was a perfect example,” he added. “We rolled that out in Arizona two years ago and have been on a journey continuing to improve the quality of the product and build a real brand that people would be loyal to, and then making it a fun brand and doing collaborations with a local restaurateur and all that stuff that we did with Timeless. We replicate that in an authentic way, and once we feel like it’s on a good track, we start looking at what’s the next thing, but we don’t go to that next thing until we know we’ve done a good job with what we have.”
In other words, one Timeless step at a time.
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