Editor’s Note:
Fairwinds is a company we’ve admired for a long time, because of the way they looked beyond conventional wisdom to develop one of the more consistent and successful companies in Washington state.
In an interview for our 10th annual Women to Watch section, CEO Wendy Hull said it perfectly: “When everybody was going right, we went left.”
One of the company’s first hit products was the Flow topical gel, something that bucked the trend of “recreational” products being the best-sellers in adult-use shops.
“It was unlike anything else on the market,” co-founder James Hull told Marijuana Venture of the Flow gel for a 2019 cover story. “We put a lot of time into making sure we had the formula.”
This story was originally published in the September 2019 issue of Marijuana Venture.
Fairwinds Manufacturing is something of an outlier. It is one of the highest-grossing marijuana producer/processors in the state of Washington, but unlike nearly every competitor, it does not actually sell marijuana.
“Right out of the gate we decided we weren’t going to be a flower company,” says co-owner and chief technology officer James Hull. “Everything we grow, we extract and put that into our product, whether it’s a topical, a capsule or a vape cartridge.”
In fact, for some of the products, cannabis takes a back seat to the myriad other herbs that make up the formulations.
“Cannabis is just one of our ingredients, and sometimes it’s not the main ingredient,” says co-owner and CEO Wendy Hull.
In a state where the medical marijuana market has all but been eliminated by recreational, adult-use retail stores, Fairwinds was designed to be, and remains today, a wellness company. As a rule, it does not aim for the highest-THC numbers possible, but instead looks to treat concerns many people have using natural herbs — including cannabis — as medicine.
“We knew we wanted to make wellness products,” Wendy says. “We weren’t nearly as interested in getting people stoned.”
And the strategy has paid off for Fairwinds, which is now available in more than 330 stores across Washington and is one of the top 10 producers in the state in retail sales, according to Headset, as of summer 2019.