Wendy Hull
Wendy HullFairwinds CEO
INDUSTRY MAVERICK | Fairwinds CEO Wendy Hull has piloted her trailblazing cannabis business through Washington’s tumultuous industry by anticipating production trends and then doing the opposite. Her business flourished at the onset of recreational sales by dedicating products to the state’s medical patients who were essentially abandoned by regulators.
“It’s a term that they used to say when sailors would leave, like, may the wind be at your back and give you smooth sailing,” Hull says. “We thought it was going to be fitting because it was a brand-new industry.”
Despite the name invoking hopes and prayers, Hull wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. As all of Washington’s licensed producers were forced into recreational sales, Hull set out to make Fairwinds the definitive, high-quality medical brand.
“When everybody was going right, we went left,” she says. “We focused on doing something that nobody else did at the time and it was so easy back in early 2015 to get in the stores, because everybody was dropping off samples of flower and we were dropping off samples of tinctures and topicals.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that the company decided to diversify and focus on flower with the launch of its Passion Flower product line. While the product line has injected new life into the company, Hull assures brand loyalists that Fairwinds hasn’t abandoned its medical roots and a new ailment-focused product is set to debut in early 2025. Fairwinds also produces a CBD line, Vitality Naturals, which has opened the door for the company to do white-labeling for businesses in Canada, Costa Rica and Brazil.
“That’s really ended up turning into its own successful company, in a lot of ways, more successful than Fairwinds under 502, because we have a larger audience,” Hull says.
Prior to launching Fairwinds, Hull worked in security for the federal government for 26 years. The animosity of leaving a federal position to work in a federally illegal field motivated her to help change perceptions about cannabis. She says it seemed odd at the time that most of her peers would take nearly any prescription medications without much hesitation and yet, something as simple as a plant would raise so many eyebrows.
“But once I left, I never looked back, and I never once thought I would fail. It never crossed my mind,” Hull says. “What honestly made it so exciting was that not very often do you get an opportunity to get in on the ground floor and really shape an industry and help shape the perception of an industry.”
After more than 10 years of working in Washington’s tumultuous cannabis market, Hull has watched as perceptions changed about the plant and industry. The company once struggled to find vendors for even simple branding merchandise, but is now screening calls from solicitors looking to book them as clients. In hindsight, Hull says her biggest success in the industry, aside from surviving, is taking an approach that built a brand people trust.
“It makes me feel like we made good decisions early on and built that foundation of trust,” she says. “To me, that is probably still the biggest accomplishment — that trust from consumers.”