Originally published at Dope Magazine
BY SHWA LAYTART - SEPTEMBER 15, 2018
The Guild – San Jose, CA
Known for the kindest of the kind, The Guild San Jose is the flagship dispensary that carries Guild Extracts’ award-winning products. Yes, the same Guild Extracts that took first place at the Emerald Cup, as well as the second place award for their Strawberry Banana Sauce hybrid concentrate and third place for their collaboration with Fleur D’Elite CBD concentrate at the High Times Cannabis Cup NorCal.
The award-winning store budtenders are known for getting personal and passionate based on the customers’ needs and desires — without getting pushy or blasé.
The Product
The Guild features a 2,500-square-foot store with 40,000 square feet of onsite grow and a customer-facing nursery powered by Pacific Reserve. Owing to a top-notch extract team and collaborations with local artisans, The Guild team offers quality products, such as their top-selling vape, the Guild Extracts 510 Series, loaded with their home-brew sauce. They’re a major vertical grow, and also grow exclusively for companies like California favorite Lemon Tree — which sells out faster than a Funko pop. “It’s more than a menu,” asserts director of merchandising and customer experience Nancy-Lee Carpenter.
“There is a story behind each product that we offer — we call it ‘the romance behind the brand’ — and our budtenders recognize that customers are looking for us to share those special details with them.”
The People
Carpenter is top-shelf — a professional executive buyer with the type of experience that should be driving every retail store, including dispensaries. She handles all purchasing, marketing, budtender training, compliance, logistics, brand management and PR, creating the highest possible quality experience. Working directly with the CEO, Hector Gonzalez, she makes sure all products are spectacular and supplied by artisan cannabis businesses throughout California. In short, Carpenter gives The Guild the upper hand.
So, Gonzalez, can you clone Carpenter? Asking for an industry friend.
“It’s more than a menu. There is a story behind each product that we offer — we call it ‘the romance behind the brand.’”
– Nancy-Lee Carpenter, The Guild director of merchandising and customer experience
Comments