Every cannabis brand is fighting for shelf space. But Jamie Lipowitz realized early on that shelf space was never the point—the person standing in front of it was.

Jake and Duffy sit down with Jamie Lipowitz, founder and CEO of High Buds Club, who built a 7,000-member budtender community from scratch with $5,000 and zero outside funding. It started with a single moment in a Venice Beach dispensary, when a budtender flipped her purchase decision in thirty seconds flat. She flew home to Toronto and started building the playbook for how brands actually win at the shelf in Canada.

Jamie doesn't mince words. She'll tell you why your store drop-bys aren't working, why THC percentage is not a story, and why the budtender is the most undervalued person in the entire cannabis supply chain.

If you're trying to figure out how to get your brand off the shelf and into someone's hands, this one is your blueprint.

Topics Covered:

• Why the last five feet of retail matters more than everything above it
• The Venice Beach moment that started it all
• Why dropping by dispensaries is mostly a waste of time
• How to build a community people actually show up to
• Why most cannabis brands don't have a story—just a spec sheet
• What Sephora, Diet Coke, and RC Cola can teach cannabis brands
• Building as a lone founder in a boys' club industry
• Why attention—not samples—is the real product

About Our Guest: Jamie Lipowitz is the founder and CEO of High Buds Club, an online community and media platform connecting cannabis brands with budtenders across Canada. With a background in advertising, media sales, and influencer marketing, Jamie saw the budtender as the most critical and most ignored link in the cannabis retail chain—and built an entire business around that conviction, entirely bootstrapped.

Links & References:

• High Buds Club