Marijuana Business Magazine September 2018

Manage your cultivation and extraction operations in one system Connect directly to state and Canadian regulatory systems Track your plants with barcoding and RFID Manage your entire business, including POS and payroll Runs in the cloud on any device nextecgroup.com/mjbiz TSX Venture Exchange – the company announced record monthly sales of more than $770,000. What decision turned that first trickle into a steady stream? Simple, Dollinger said: “We looked for areas where vapor- izers weren’t in the world.” The company spotted openings in the nascent British and German markets, for example. “We started to move product globally as quickly as possible,” Dollinger said. Dollinger calls going public the best money he ever put into the company. Doing so gave Namaste access to capital to extend its international reach. The decision, which Dollinger esti- mates has garnered just shy of $46 million in capital, “allowed us to make acquisitions that we never would have dreamt we would have made,” he said. For example: Namaste bought Australian Vaporizers, which controls 90% of the vaporizer market in Aus- tralia, for $4.2 million in 2017. In the three months ended May 31, 2018, the company rang up $1 million in sales Down Under. Invest in Customer Service Dollinger believes that in any com- petitive market – cannabis or otherwise – the only way a company can differ- entiate is by becoming “obsessed with customer service, really going above and beyond.” In May 2018, Namaste paid $12 million to acquire Findify, a Swedish com- pany that uses artificial intelligence to study user behavior to personal- ize online experiences in real time. Findify’s platform provides consum- ers with personalized search, product recommendations and advanced data analytics. “We believe that this will give us a much-needed lift to provide the customer with an unbelievable experience while shopping on our site,” Dollinger said. “If I was being shown a whole bunch of women’s clothing on Amazon while shopping for men’s clothing, it would not make for the best start to a shop- ping experience,” he said. Similarly, “If you’re shopping for vaporizers that go with a dry leaf, why would I show you one that goes with an oil? That’s really what that whole experience is about.” Findify was an expensive invest- ment for Namaste to apply to its many sites, but by purchasing it, Namaste’s 30-plus websites now have access to the technology. And customers seem to be responding: Sixty days after bringing on Findify, Dollinger said that one of the