My wife and I have been mulling the idea of opening a dispensary in southern california and were curious about how to approach this. One of the things we were hoping to do is to take an ayurvedic approach to what we sell and cultivate, with a focus on South Asian usage of herb. We want to tap into some of the spirituality of it, but still grounded in it being a a down to earth dispensary with a good variety of products. Some of it has to do with taking ownership back of our cuture and our roots and getting rid of the mysticism and exoticism of cannabis in India, and making it more of a pragmatic approach with a quality of life aspect to it.

So to my fellow stoners. When you're at a dispensary, what types of products do you normally get, and what do you wish they had? It can be anything - cannabis infused ghee? Bharfi edibles? A special bhang mixture during Holi? Any specific strains you enjoy and would like to see more of? Do you go to events held at your dispensary or are you purely transactional?

The other goal here is vertical integration. We want to look at small batch growers and more artisanal growers with higher quality bud in smaller yields and build a house-brand that starts off as white-label and eventually grows into our own in-house grow operation. Cut out any middleman and wholesaler completely once we have the strains and genetics down to a science.

I grow on my own right now and have had some good success, and understand the landscape pretty well, so i'm thinking of potentially applying for a license soonish. Right now it's more about market validation and getting overall feedback from users.