Marijuana Business Magazine April 2020

Marijuana Business Magazine | April 2020 94 reconfigured. …This included everything from new flooring to a new roof,” Elias said. Consequently, the city was “very accommodating” when the company approached it to ask about acquiring redesign specifications. However, Michigan Pure Med did encounter some challenges during the design process, including the project’s six-month timeline and planning the build while simultaneously designing the interior and creating specifications for the custom-made mill work. Additional hurdles included state and municipal limits on where cannabis dispensaries can be located. For example, Michigan requires dispensaries to be located no less than 1,000 feet from K-12 schools and designed in accordance with electrical, engineering and health- care requirements. “Some of those constraints are driven from the architectural design perspective, but we’re also limited in some cases with land. Also, municipalities play into the specs. And that varies from one city to the next,” Elias said. Consequently, Common Citizen will not be able to provide cafes and private rooms at all of its planned facilities, although they will mimic the Flint redesign as much as pos- sible. The company owns nine retail licenses, has three open dispensaries and plans by the end of this year to build seven new facilities, some of which Elias said will be built from the ground up and some of which will be “extensively renovated” redesigns of existing buildings. “The problem with Michigan,” Elias said, “is that you can’t really pick your retail location. There are so many constraints that prohibit you from finding the ideal location, so that you don’t compromise your architectural design. And if you wait too long, you … lose the opportunity.” In Michigan, only 8%-9% of municipalities have opted into medical cannabis, and they’re allowed to restrict usage, Elias noted. “So they pass these ordinances that … create separation requirements. And they’re often pretty significant. By the time you get all the separation requirements, there’s only a handful of locations that you’re allowed to buy and (conduct) retail. And then there’s this frenzy of people who are all going after locations that are not ideal. Sometimes they put them in these very weird zones that are not really suitable for retail.” Common Citizen, for instance, is half a mile from the nearest retail corridor and therefore receives only about 9,000 vehicles traveling through the area daily—or about half the traffic seen in other retail corridors. “If you looked at it purely from a retail standpoint,” Elias said, “you might raise an eyebrow. … But because it was the Raincoat Lounge … there was a historical response to it. …There’s a lot of stories that the locals bring in when they come. A lot of fond memories.” Color-Coded Tables Common Citizen’s minimalist design and black-and-white palette is complemented by the arrangement of inventory on color-coded tables. Each color represents one of four needs-based states (or “common” states, as the company refers to them), which identify both intended product effects and common health conditions. They include: • Yellow: Recreational, or social, consumers. • Blue: People with chronic illnesses and pain-management needs. • Purple: Solo users who want to unplug in the privacy of their homes. • Red: Consumers who are interested in microdosing to maintain or improve wellness. “By no means are we trying to compartmentalize people into four categories,” said Mike Elias, co-founder and CEO of Michigan Pure Med, the vertically integrated medical cannabis company that owns Common Citizen. “What we’re gathering is that there are four types of consumers that the needs states speak to.” Respectively tagged as Time to Shine, Sweet Relief, Unplug and Daily Dose, these common states give customers the “freedom to understand at a glance” the intended effect of each product, Elias said. Time to Shine products, for example, “contain sativa, which promotes high energy, while Unplug products contain indica, which helps people relax at the end of the day, relieve pain and get better sleep.” – Celene Adams Mike Elias Courtesy Photo BusinessStrategies | Retail