Miracle Greens owner Mike Hayes, far right, poses with the delivery crew from Briteside: Jesse Banner, Clinton Cranston, Taylor Nelson and John Nason.
Spring is in the air. It’s sad to know the ski season is coming to an end, but bring on the sun and days on the lake! Spring also means our farms are ramping up for another season of new growth and new beginnings.
At Miracle Greens, we are excited for a new location and new relationships to help us grow in 2018. In the last issue, I touched on vendors selling at price points that are unsustainable for long periods of time — price points that don’t provide enough cash flow for the retailer or the farmer to survive.
We value our vendors and their sustainability, so we took something I learned from my time in the semiconductor market and started the process of creating strategic accounts. We negotiated with vendors whom we believe have the business model and quality control intended for long-term success. Our idea is to create a pricing floor for the vendor and, in turn, create a price ceiling for us.
At first, the response from vendors to negotiate long-term pricing was lackluster, but as the market continued to decline, interest began to increase. We were sensitive to the fact that we were asking vendors to lock in a lower price for a long period of time. But, they realized the shop wasn’t going to keep bartering for a lower price every time. In the long run, the new the strategic relationship was going to create more time for the vendor to produce great product without worrying about who was going to buy it. And we know when prices go up, the shop won’t be hit with price hikes and supply shortages.
So far, it’s working. The turnaround on ordering is shorter (lower labor cost) and quality cannabis is on the shelf without price-gouging the consumer. It’s a win-win relationship.
But we didn’t want to stop at just partnering with cannabis vendors. We started a delivery service with Briteside (more to come) and started to look outside our market for consumer brand recognition. The general manager for my bar, Maverick’s, came to me with a new promotion from one of our beer sales representatives. We got our hands on a snowboard with their brand name on it, and we’re now working with the beer company to give it away to one lucky customer. It was something we did a lot in the bar industry. Why couldn’t we do the same in the cannabis industry? Probably because no one was asking, so I did.
I built a trustworthy reputation during my 14 years in the bar industry (it feels like a lifetime) so I had a solid foundation with the company I asked, 10 Barrel Brewing Co., which started in Bend and were recently bought by the largest beer company in the world. When you look at the promotion, it was pretty simple: We displayed their product to attract brand recognition within the shop.
Everyone loved it and it was a huge success in attracting more attention to the shop. To us at Miracle Greens, it was a simple “nod” from across the room that spoke volumes by one of the “big dogs.” So cheers to new beginnings and new growth. We raise our beers and joints to our new strategic accounts, and to those big dogs who think we are doing something right.
The miracle is in the greens.