Why We Built StrainBrain Labs - A Treatise on Cannabis Retail
Start with the uncomfortable math.
About 30% of your customers generate 70% of your revenue. The other 70% of customer spread out over the long tail. And almost all of them, call it 99%, shop at more than one dispensary.(l'll save the loyalty of illusion for a separate post).So if you strip out your discount calendar and your rewards points, what is actually different between your store and the one three blocks away? If you do not have a clean, confident answer to that you are not alone. Most cannabis retailers were wired for compliance and cash flow, not for modern e-commerce.
Outside cannabis, this problem has already been solved three times over. Grocery, cosmetics, fashion, they all had to grow up. They all had to admit that the game is relationships, not shelf space. They put a stake in the ground about who they are, how they show up, and how they will use data and analytics to shape the experience in real-time. That is the core of StrainBrain Labs. Take that retail DNA and apply it to cannabis, without pretending we are operating in a non-regulated industry.
Retail is not the store, it is the loop.
Modern retail is simple in theory.
- Customers show up.
- They do something.
- You learn.
- You adjust the next thing they see.
- Repeat that forever.
The website, the store layout, the promotions, even the way your Budtenders talk, are just expressions of that loop. The mature operators treat everything as an experiment. They do not fall in love with their own ideas. They fall in love with what works.
Cannabis, for the most part, skipped that step. The stack looks like this: a template menu, a race to the bottom on price, a loyalty program bolted on top, and a set of reports that explain what happened last month, not what to do next.
Meanwhile your customer is living in a different world.
- They get algorithmic recommendations on Netflix.
- Dynamic promos in grocery.
- Personalized drops in beauty and fashion.
Their expectations move, but your dispensary tech does not. That is the disconnect I care about.
Two levers worth obsessing over: Innovation and Intimacy
If you strip away the noise, two things will keep a cannabis customer coming back when they have ten other options, innovation and intimacy.
Innovation. Not only in product, but in how you run the shop, how you merchandise, how you surface the right thing at the right time, how you experiment with experience. Refusing to accept that the current way the menu looks is the final form.
Intimacy. The sense that you actually know them. Not in a creepy way, in a competent way. You remember what they liked, you help them discover what is new, you make them feel like this is their spot, even though you know they buy from other places. You are not just cheaper. You are smarter, more useful, more tuned in to their reasons for being there.
Retailers have tried to design this on whiteboards for years. Personas. Journeys. Sticky notes everywhere. That was fine when the world moved slowly. It does not anymore. The target is moving constantly. Products rotate. Regulations shift. Customer behavior morphs monthly. With the confluence of AI, unstructured data, and access to massive computational power, this is now a real-time, ongoing initiative.
The good news, the data and the technology finally exist inside cannabis to treat this as a living system, not an annual workshop.
From annual marketing mix to real-time cannabis reality
Old school consumer brands use a thing called Marketing Mix. They look at price, promotions, channels, media, and ask what actually moved the needle on sales and brand health. Historically, they did this once a year, maybe twice if they could, because the plumbing was hard and the math was heavy and it got expensive.
Cannabis retailers barely get this lens at all. They might get a one-off promo recap. Maybe a vendor sends a deck. Then everyone goes back to guessing.
We can do better.
- You have transaction data.
- You have product data.
- You have customer and loyalty data.
If you wire it correctly, you can run your own version of Marketing Mix continuously, tuned for cannabis. You can see in almost real-time, which combinations of product, story, and price are building relationships and which are just training people to wait for the next coupon.
That is the heartbeat of StrainBrain Labs.
What StrainBrain Labs does.
We built StrainBrain around OWL, our cannabis specific AI engine. It started life helping people choose products. It became obvious it should be doing more. StrainBrain Labs is where we point OWL at the whole relationship between customer and retailer, not just the moment they stare at a menu.
In practice, that means:
Behavioral data
How often someone shops, what they browse, what they ignore, whether they only show up on deal days, and how they move across locations.
Product data
Not just strain names and categories, but effects, use cases, price bands, novelty, what tends to anchor a cart, and what tends to be an add on.
Customer data
Preferences, response to different offers, outcomes they care about, lifetime behavior, early signs of churn, early signs of loyalty that are more than just points.
We pull this into one loop and ask clear questions
- Who is worth deepening intimacy with right now?
- What mix of product, story, and price actually strengthens the relationship instead of burning margin?
- Where should we innovate first, digitally or in store, to move the needle fastest?
Why a Labs program?
You do not change the DNA of a retail operation by shipping a widget and sending over a login. You do it by working with operators who are willing to actually use the information and run experiments that might make them a little uncomfortable at first. That is why we built StrainBrain Labs as a Labs initiative that lives beyond the AI Budtender. It's not for the faint of heart.
Inside Labs we:
- Co-design experiences that connect innovation and intimacy, digital and in-store.
- Share performance insight in a way that is usable by humans, not just analysts.
- Build testing roadmaps tied to real numbers, cart size, visit frequency, long term value, not vanity metrics.
This is not about theory. It is about using real stores and real customers to define what modern cannabis retail feels like when it grows up.
Who Labs is for
StrainBrain Labs is not for everyone. That is intentional.It is for Operators who are ready to stop pretending that price and proximity are enough. Operators who look at the 70/30 reality, admit that most of their customers are also shopping down the street, and decide to compete on something deeper. Operators who are willing to take some risks, run some tests, maybe even have a few failures. Because on the other side, there are higher margins and happier customers. Be the Whole Foods, or Sephora, or Trader Joe's of the industry.
In the first wave, we are looking for 3 more Operators who want to live on that edge with us, who are willing to push the boundaries a bit, modernize their experience, and treat their business like the e-commerce companies they admire in other categories.
StrainBrain Labs is the bridge between where cannabis retail is today and the kind of relationship driven, data fluent, slightly obsessive version it needs to become.
Interested? Vist https://strainbrainlabs.com/
Connect with the author: Noel Burkman at LinkedIn
