Ebony Costain
Company: BDTNDR
Title: CEO
Age: 35
For the past 12 months, the editorial staff at Marijuana Venture has compiled a list of candidates for our third annual 40 Under 40 feature. This year, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of worthy candidates to come up with a cross-section of personalities across the U.S. and Canada, from salt-of-the-earth farmers to tech savants. All of them have unique stories, successes and ambitions and all represent the excitement and promise of the cannabis business. We feel honored to share their stories and look forward to watching them push forward in our ever-evolving industry.
Growing up, Ebony Costain watched her parents operate their own business and couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever want to work for themselves. She saw first-hand the challenges, the long hours and the obstacles at every turn.
But working for a decade in corporate America changed her mind.
“I knew my abilities and creativity would better serve me as an entrepreneur and so I made the jump and started my first non-cannabis business in 2014,” she says.
With her experience in retail, Costain understood the importance of a well-educated sales force. And in the relatively new cannabis industry, she saw the budtenders as an under-utilized asset for brands to connect with consumers.
Thus, BDTNDR was born.
“BDTNDR is a platform that connects cannabis brands directly to budtenders to help deliver the brands’ marketing and product message,” Costain says. “We not only empower budtenders with information, we also reward them for their product knowledge with various rewards and incentives. Standardizing the way information is passed from brands to budtenders to end consumer is needed in this space and it can only strengthen the community.”
Costain started BDTNDR in 2017 and participated in Canopy Boulder’s fall program. The web-based platform is free for budtenders and cannabis retailers, while brands pay for their products to be featured. There are currently more than 300 budtenders using the platform, and while it is currently available only in Colorado, Costain says she definitely sees a multi-state expansion on the horizon.