From left to right: Wana Brands chief financial officer Sandy Li, former CEO Nancy Whiteman, chief operating officer Kelly Flores.
Wana Brands executives Sandy Li and Kelly Flores aim to continue growing the international brand’s culture after former CEO Nancy Whiteman’s departure
Wana Brands has long been among the most prolific cannabis companies in the industry. The Colorado-based company was founded in 2010, during the state’s medical marijuana program, and has grown to become one of the very few international cannabis enterprises, with operations across North America and most recently into Europe. With founder Nancy Whiteman at the helm for well over a decade, Wana could easily be considered the top woman-led business in the cannabis industry since the early days of adult-use legalization.
“I think what I’ve appreciated about Nancy’s leadership style is that she appreciates individuality and values everybody’s opinion, regardless of your background or your role,” says Wana Brands chief operating officer Kelly Flores. “It’s a natural fit for a leadership team. … We don’t always agree, but it’s definitely an environment that is safe to say what you need to say.”
Whiteman stepped down from her day-to-day leadership of the company at the end of May 2024, though she will continue to play an active role with the Wana Brands Foundation, a nonprofit she launched in 2022.
Also in May, Canadian cannabis giant Canopy Growth confirmed that it will acquire Wana Brands in a deal that was three years in the making and included a $297.5 million up-front payment to Wana Brands in 2021.
As Whiteman stepped away from her role as CEO, the question of what will happen to the company’s culture and what the potential void of female leadership would mean for the industry loomed at the end of spring. However, while Joe Hodas stepped into the role as CEO, most of the company’s leadership positions are still held by women who help maintain the legacy Whiteman started.
“The reason Wana became Wana was because of her,” says Wana Brands chief financial officer Sandy Li. “She built that culture. She carried that flag to where we are today. The culture was from her, but it is a collective from the team. We are going to continue to build the culture.”
Li describes the former CEO as a “legend in cannabis” and “the best leader to build leaders.” She conveys a sense of pride in becoming part of the company’s culture and helping it live on under its new parent company, Canopy USA, and new leadership.
“We are all working on strategy, but any strategy takes time,” she says. “It takes time to figure out what we want to be, but at the same time to figure out implementation, to monitor the results, it takes time to really integrate all the teams to work together.”
Li already had a great deal of academic and executive experience prior to joining Wana. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a master’s degree in finance from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.
She started her career as the co-founder and president of a tech supply chain company, growing it from nothing into one of the largest distributors in Southwest China. After six years, Li sold the company and moved to North America, where she spent nearly 20 years working in finance for a variety of traditional companies. Around 2020, she started seeing more and more sophisticated business leaders enter the cannabis space. As a self-described lifetime learner, she decided to join the industry as vice president of financial planning analysis and treasury for the multi-state operator Parallel in 2020.
“My earlier entrepreneurship helped me really well, because in cannabis you have got to make changes, you’ve got to be adaptable,” Li says. “Cannabis is a challenging world and that’s why a lot of people don’t want to get involved, but challenges always come with opportunity and rewards to grow professionally and personally.”
But knowing there’s something new every day makes the cannabis industry exciting, she says. One example would be Canopy’s venture into the European cannabis market through a partnership in Switzerland.
“Globalization is, at some point, going to require joint efforts,” she says. “We want to go there, and we want to have early entry.”
Flores echoes Li’s sentiment about the company’s partnership in Europe, describing it as similar to a highly choreographed dance between timing, regulations and market potential.
“It’s about being there quick, but not too quick, because it’s going to take quite a bit of investment to be in some of these markets,” Flores says. “We’re staying really close to the regulations in each of these different markets, figuring out the best supply chain in the background.”
Flores has more than 20 years of experience as a CPG executive with cannabis brands Wana and Dosist, as well as traditional CPG companies like Monster and Nestle. The execution of Wana’s European launch may seem like a daunting task, but Flores says it was the challenges inherent to cannabis that brought her to the industry in the first place. She had worked for massive companies in the past and had launched products all over the world, but wanted to use her vast experience to do that with a different type of regulated product.
“Cannabis felt like a natural fit,” she says.
Flores joined Wana Brands in 2022 and oversees the company’s back-office support systems, in-house manufacturing operations and sourcing. She also heads the team that decides which international markets make financial sense for the company. Flores says the invigorating part of her position is its open-ended solutions; there was already a map for entering new international markets in traditional CPG, but in cannabis “as long as it’s legal, there’s nothing off the table.”
“It’s always trying to organize chaos,” Flores says. “The thought and the creativity to the solutions that the team comes up with, it’s incredible. There’s so much flexibility in this industry.”