How to Start a Cannabis Brand in a Mature Market

Getting a licensed cannabis business off the ground in any market, whether just opened or deeply established, is pretty much always a major undertaking. Both types of market maturity levels come with many different challenges; in new markets, simply getting a license can be close to impossible depending on preexisting demand, so prospective operators who don’t win their respective lotteries have to purchase them or wait until later rounds to be issued one. In mature markets however where competition is entrenched and the survivors have spent years optimizing, succeeding with a new brand requires new or exciting products, well thought out marketing, and operational efficiency from day one. 

In this exclusive Lowtemp Industries blog, we’ll lay out the most important things any would-be operator needs to do to successfully launch a new brand in a mature cannabis market.

Cannabis License Types & Direction

One of the most straightforward types of cannabis companies to launch in mature markets are those focused on concentrates or other infused products such as solventless edibles. This is because as consumers in recreational states or countries get used to smoking flower and eating the same types of edibles, they tend to want to try new things, and extract sales tend to quickly grow as markets mature. In addition to demand uplift, new labs tend to be a lot less capital intensive than grows to launch, plus they have the benefit of purchasing the right kinds of biomass for their product efforts from a large roster of established cultivators. This gives new labs many more choices of strains than they’d ever be able to provide with their own grow efforts. 

Picking the right kind of license to operate in your market requires careful planning and research based on the unique factors in each state as some allow for all types of extraction activities, and some are much more limiting. To be sure, we definitely are not suggesting it’s impossible to bring a new flower brand forward successfully, and if that’s what your leadership team is passionate about, by all means. It’s just a lot easier in most cases to do a lab as your startup business, and then grow into other areas such as cultivation if material supply and demand allow for it. Taking unnecessary risks is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of your P&Ls, so do your homework on what consumers are after and crucially which existing competitors are already working overtime to fulfill.