The Month End Podcast

Episode 31: Bryan Gerber • Hemper

May 30, 2023 Bryan Gerber Season 1 Episode 31
The Month End Podcast
Episode 31: Bryan Gerber • Hemper
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In episode thirty-one, Accountfully's CEO and Partner, Brad Ebenhoeh, talks with the "King of Cones", CEO and co-founder of Hemper and Hara Supply. Bryan shares his journey from George Washington University-trained Accounting and Info. Systems major to creator of the world's largest distributor of cones and celebrity-endorsed cannabis subscription company, Hemper. So many interesting lessons learned are touched upon in the episode; from influencer marketing success stories, to supply chain pivots and scrappy entrepreneurial thinking through the endless challenges of regulations surrounding the cannabis industry.

For more small business and CPG- focused resources, visit Accountfully's resources page, where you will find helpful articles, guides, eBooks and more.
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Brad Ebenhoeh:

Welcome to The Month End CPG community chat, The Month End will provide emerging CPG brands real life knowledge into the accounting, finance and operational world. Our guests will be key stakeholders from those same brands as well as other key contributors to the industry. Welcome, it's episode 31 of The Month End podcast today I have CEO and co founder of hemper Brian Gerber on the chat. How you doing today, Brian? Good,

Bryan Gerber:

Brad, thank you so much for having me today. Super excited to chat.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Yeah, me too, really excited to chat about hemper and Hora supply a couple of businesses that you founded and grown over the last several years specific to kind of accounting, finance, operational questions or comments, but also the specific kind of nature in terms of some of the issues that could have come up from a regulatory standpoint. So before we get started in details, let's kind of step back. Give us a background of who you are, where you come from. And then let's talk about what your businesses do, who you sell to and kind of the phase you're at today. And then we'll get into some of the detailed questions.

Bryan Gerber:

Cool. Yeah. So I started Hemper 2015, like a week after I graduated from university, I studied Accounting and Information Systems at GW. The original concept for Hemper was a direct to consumer subscription box for basically stoner paraphernalia products. And it was a discovery outlet. As most people know, this is a very discreet industry, nobody's really raising their hand saying, "Hi, I'm a consumption person." And so when I first launched, it was really just about convenience. And at the time, Amazon wasn't really touching this category. So you couldn't really buy this stuff online, unless it was like a, you know, online head shop or something. But the experiences were kind of terrible. And I was really just looking for kind of my best friend to tell me all the latest, greatest cool stuff on a monthly basis. And that was the Hemper box. And so it became kind of took the industry by storm. Obviously, 2015 was a huge subscription economy here with you know, Birchbox and FabFitFun. And everyone raising, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And, you know, we really got into this niche pretty early on on the subscription side. And really what catapulted the business originally was actually like celebrity curated boxes. So"Smoke Like Snoop Dogg" for a month was the concept originally, which we came up with six months into the business. And that went from like 300 subscribers in the fourth month to 2,000 subscribers in, you know, the six month and then we started just working with larger influencers and celebrities. And we worked with like, Flosstradamus, Rico Nasty, Cypress Hill, Ty $, so on and so forth. And we really drove home connecting with, you know, your favorite artist or your favorite professional skater, whoever it might be in a totally different way. And that's how we kind of got to this point today. And then we sort of transitioned into more of theme based boxes, you know, UFO theme, rubber ducky theme, Chinese takeout theme. And actually, people started taking to the themes more than the celebrities. Because if you don't like Snoop Dogg, you're not buying his box. Right. But everyone loves UFO conspiracies. So it was a quick transition for us. And then I really focused early on, how are we going to keep this fresh? How are we going to keep the subscribers coming back. And what I really identified was product development. And I think that's really where like, FAB Fit Fun, destroy the other beauty boxes, where they came out with their own products and brands, and then release that through the subscription box. And then they took those products and brands that were really popular, went to Nordstroms, Bloomingdale's started selling them mass market distro and retail. And that's exactly the model that we emulated. And so what we do today, is we develop gadgets, we release them through our Trojan horse marketing outlet, which is the subscription box, we get feedback from 1000s of customers overnight, we take that data and we go to our distribution and retail partners and say, "hey, look, we just launched this, we sold 30,000 a month, the reviews are raving, push this into your distribution network." So it was one of the first data driven approaches to this industry. The ancillary part were really before it was like, "hi, I had a high idea one day, please sell my product." Right. I think it's cool, you know, and I knew that wasn't going to get this market to kind of move forward with us. It was really like all of the data we're about to collect all the customer the social proof. You know, we've got over 800,000 followers on social media today. And so that was really the driving force behind Hemper which was just developing really cool products driving real value, and giving customers exactly what they're looking for before they even know they need it.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

That's awesome. Super cool, built a huge community, use them as your test market, and then actually launch your own products into there and scaling it up from there. That's awesome. Yeah. And that's been around since 2015.

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, the first three years of the company. And then we started actually getting this kind of reputation for being like really scrappy at manufacturing stuff. And a lot of the other packaging companies and a lot of our customers business models have changed over the years as the industry has kind of matured. So a lot of the packaging companies were selling paraphernalia products to dispensaries. When it was direct to dispensary model, right where they were filling pre rolls at the dispensary counter in California. And it really wasn't really regulated in that sense. And so we started manufacturing products for a lot of these Packaging Companies. And so we got this really good reputation of just being able to deliver on everything they needed. And then we got this interesting opportunity in this pre roll cone segments where there's always been this massive shortage, because every pre roll cone in the industry, which I can show you right here looks very similar, like something like this. Yeah. Basically, it's they're all handmade. So that is the bottleneck, right? And there's a labor arbitrage, where there's really only two countries, you can do this in, which is Indonesia and India, at this point, there's some in Dominican Republic, but that's gonna go away soon. So we basically said, "okay, you know, for however many dollars of outstanding inventory that you need us to make up in terms of that gap, we'll go out and figure it out." So it took us about six months to figure out the lay of the land. And really, what you had in the market already was really just like sweatshop models, to be honest. Right? And not only did we want to solve the supply shortage, but we wanted to really do it on a social conscious basis, where, you know, we were setting up proper facilities with good manufacturing practices, real certifications, you know, clean rooms, you know, I mentioned this the other day on another interview, you know, we get doctor's visits appointments twice a year for all of our employees, things like that, right? And so it took us about six months, we went back to our customers and said, "Hey, here's our cones. What do you guys think?" they said, "This is awesome. How many can you make?", we said, "as many as you need", walked out of that meeting with a half a million dollar purchase order, and kind of the rest is history, we, in the last four to five years, we've now become the largest manufacturer in the world, for cones and other combustible products, we produce about 100 million a month for the market's, largest entities; your MSOs, your Jeeter's, your Stacy's of the world. And we went in more of a solutions partner approach, not a one size fits all, which is what was already there, and really tell me the dream will go figure it out for you, as opposed to a one size fits all model. And we've been able to garner over 30% of the market in a short amount of years. And our scale is insane compared to our competitors, our quality and our lead times are unmatched. And so that's the other part of the business that's kind of complementary, just on the b2b side. So we have this very interesting scope, this big CPG brand on this direct-to-consumer side of the company. And then we have this really big b2b manufacturing arm. And so to give you kind of a scale, we're at now 14 manufacturing sites in New Delhi, India, with about 4,000 employees.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Wow, congrats. That is that is that is quite the the enterprise that you're building here. And very interesting model of again, building a community getting customers getting feedback. And then you know, providing them products. But then also what is your problem? Let's try to fix it versus this is what we're selling, take it or leave it. I think that whole solutions kind of mindset of "hey, you're looking for this, we'll see if we can figure that out." So several kinds of questions that come into brain from kind of this whole kind of operational stance standpoint. Number one is what I guess what were some mistakes you get you made operationally in relation to scaling to quick or not. What were some issues you came in, like specifically with dealing with overseas? Because I mean, there's there's a whole bunch of issues here. International situations you talked about. And again, we'll get into the whole kind of regulation standpoint and on the industry, but kind of operationally what were a couple of, I guess, maybe mistakes you made, but then also maybe a couple of good decisions you made kind of as you scaled your business from 2015 and Hemper to HARA.

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, totally. So really early on, I had this vision or dream, call it that we were going to be the only smoking accessory subscription box that was going to make its glass in the United States. And I said, we're going to figure this out, it's going to be awesome, we're going to be the only differentiator, nobody's gonna be able to compete against us. And so I, in the process of fulfilling that vision, I almost I chose the wrong manufacturer here domestically, they ended up unfortunately, using all of our money to fund other people's orders. And we had a situation where we almost had to go out of business, because all of our cash was tied up with this manufacturer. And on basically day of delivery, it was April, our April box, where we were doing a collaboration with Flosstradamus. And they were actually presenting the box at their concert at Red Rocks in Colorado. And we were supposed to fly there and bring the products and do this whole thing. And I get a call on day delivery saying 600 pieces out of 6000 show up. And obviously we had a heart attack. But more or less, you know, we figured it out , pivoted, I was able to get a Amex credit card somehow very easily and throw another 40 grand on it in a day, we are able to buy glass from another supplier. And we actually eight weeks later ended up getting that money reversed from our Chase Bank, due to the clauses in a manufacturing arrangement via bank transfer. And so we actually got that money back. And that kind of showed me that you can't make anything in the United States. It's really unfortunate, and you can't scale here. And unfortunately, in my industry, a lot of people over-promise and under deliver. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we've been so successful is we're one of the few people in this industry that do what we say and say what we do, and it's so rare. And then once people get one ounce of taste of it, they just want to keep coming back and giving us more business.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Yes, definitely kind of coming from, you know, our background as typically as like, you know, accountant financing. From that space, a lot of our last five years the clients that deal in the CPG world that have anything related to Hemp, anything related to CBD, you know, clearly getting shut down by banks, credit cards, the exact story from Amex. So it's really hard and chaotic to even run a business in the US because of federal rules and the specific state rules and all this type of stuff. That's just a pain in the butt. So when you kind of went from, you know, domestically to moving internationally, kind of how did that process work in terms of, you know, you saying,"hey, like, there was two countries that you can really scale and grow in." And like, how did you identify them? What does that mean? Is it mean, like they have unlimited kind of unlimited, kind of you have agency to do what you want, there are like, you know, minimal regulations kind of get more background in that.

Bryan Gerber:

Yes, so, and there was a major just side note payment processing massacre, I call it during 2015 to 2018, where we got shut down left and right. Companies promising us the world holding on to six figures and funds for over a year. All types of crazy stuff. So I can get into any of that if you'd

Brad Ebenhoeh:

like. But, yeah, we had, we had a couple clients at that time that literally had to put up new domains like socks and shoes.com, things like that, just to keep getting new applications going on to the world when when that existed 2018 timeframe.

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, unfortunately, one of the I guess the founders of Eaze, the delivery service, ended up I think going to jail recently for payment processing fraud, basically opening up shell corps and things like that. But yeah, so into the manufacturing side. So RJ, one of the partners is Indian. And he wasn't born in India, but has a lot of ties there. And so we were able to actually kind of go over there. And RJ's got a lot of political connections, and a lot of you know, he had family businesses over there. And so we were able to really navigate it because a lot of his family members have been able to scale manufacturing operations like this prior and in more of the textile world. And so in terms of you know, when we went over there what happened, you know, basically, with the labor prices, you know, being much more advantageous than here in the States. A lot of the products that we make, that are labor intensive, are handmade, right. So most of the glass is all handmade at this point, right? There's very little molding there's very little, there's more sophistication you'll find in China. China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, you're not going to find that sophistication in India. And so we've basically went from ground level of like, what are we even making here to like full fledged manufacturing facilities, right. And so RJ, to be honest, to give him credit, you know, has been over there since midway through 2018. Really, you know, 100 hour plus work weeks, you know, finding the right team members, hiring the right labor staff, figuring out all the legalities, you know, signing leases, putting up the facilities, training people. So credit to RJ you know, who's really sacrificed a lot being over there, putting everything together and making sure that you know, what I need over here I can get, and I can go sell it. And it's a really great kind of symbiotic relationship, where RJ manages a lot of the production and manufacturing, and I'm out there new biz, sell sales, all of that. So it's very complimentary to everything. But, ya know, it was definitely rockets points, you know, especially during COVID, supply chain was insane. But, ya know, it was not as I mean, once again, I wasn't there on the ground. So I'm sure, um, I'm lowering how difficult it was for RJ to pull this off. But, you know, it, we were able to do it, and without minimal, you know, interruption our business, and we were able to scale pretty quickly, to where we are today.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

So then, from an aspect of like, managing inventory, you know, lead times, et cetera, like what, what tools, what systems, what reports, you know, what, what do you do just kind of from that, even from, I guarantee, like, to your point five years ago, is different than COVID, three years ago, even now, but just kind of walk us through kind of your kind of mindset or your workflow with that.

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, totally. So we use so all of our E commerce stuff is on Shopify, our warehouse management system we use is fulfil.io. Our accounting software right now is we're actually on QuickBooks Online. Still, even though we do have a nine figure enterprise. We've been looking recently into switching, but you know how it is. Sometimes it the shiny new object looks great, but it's not always. So in terms of reporting and things like that, we actually built out Google studio data, where we actually have like a full reporting system. So I can literally click OK, I want to know this customer, all their invoices, where their order is in terms of completion date, when is it going to ship? So we've basically is good data and good reporting coming out, right? And we've realized that, you know, a long time ago that you know, you if you have shared data, you're never going to figure out your business. So I think that's really important is like, you know, centralizing who is inputting this data, understanding how it's being spit back out to people who are reading it. And so for us at this point, we now have a ton of different reports, in terms of, you know, what's in production, when is it going to be finished, in terms of inventory? Once we're selling, once we have, we have stop-gaps so like, once we get to a certain level, India automatically gets a PO generated to them, things like that, where it's more automated, and we don't really need to get back involved, so much on those kinds of things. But that's pretty much kind of the landscape in terms of our tech stack, or warehouse tools or inventory management. Reporting wise, you know, we, on the sales side, you know, we do a lot of like velocity retention reports. And you name it, we've gotten into it.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Cool. So sounds like you've kind of created your own kind of workflow automation inventory tool that definitely works for me works for you, which is great. And that's kind of, you know, like QuickBooks Online, clearly, you can grow and scale with that as much as possible, depending on how much data is in there, whether it's summary data, individual data, things like that, I tell, you know, there's a lot of folks that are growing, "hey, I'm finally in revenue, and do I need to move into NetSuite?" I'm like, "no, no, no", like, Okay, if you want to start spending a ton of money, reworking everything, spending a ton of money on consultants, it's a, it's a completely different way of working. So if you're wanting to move in that direction, that's fine. But, you know, with your kind of illustration, it doesn't always need to be that case, you can kind of build some tools internally, do what works for you execute, enhance, kind of continue to automate and move on from there. So that's awesome on that aspect, um, from an aspect of on the kind of the finance kind of money side of things, right, again, you're dealing with accessories, you know, so it's like indirect, you already told us the story about the you know, the AMEX card, but kind of how did you outside of that aspect is two questions. Number one is like, how did you tackle the money raising fundraising aspect? Clearly, it was a very high risk industry, but a lot of people wanted to get into the last five, six years. Right? So number one, how did you tackle that? Like, how did that go? And then second thing, I still want to get an update on your unrelated to how these payment processes are working, how banking regulations are working these days versus what they were 3, 5, 6, 8 years ago. So number one like I did you kind of grow scale fundraise kind of within the space?

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, totally. So we bootstrapped for the first three years. So from 2015 to 2018, we didn't pay ourselves, bootstrapped everything, put every dime back into the business. Originally, we found a so yeah, raising funds as a very young entrepreneur. So I started the company when I was 24. So at 27, I was raising money. And I did not realize this at the time, but you have the awesome opportunity at your fingertips, and you're allowing people to come into your opportunity. And I think a lot of young entrepreneurs think they're kind of in this begging mode. And it ends up becoming more of a turn off to the investors, because they think that you're in desperate need of this money, as opposed to here's what I've done. This is the rocket ship I'm on I need the fuel to get there. I want you involved because you can bring value. And I now know that now. But when I was first raising, you know, I went through nine months of negotiations with our seed round investors, Greg Smith at Evolution, Corporate Advisors, and my partners, were telling me, You're gonna kill the deal, you're gonna kill it. And I said, guys, like, he's giving us these revenue marks we have to hit and I don't know if we're going to hit them in that timeframe. And one day, I just said, you know, what, guys, I'm going to call Greg and said, you know, Greg, I love you, you've been the first person and investor we've ever spoken with that just wants to, you know, put fire, you know, fuel in our fire and just drive our vision forward, not change anything. But these revenue marks that we have to hit. I don't want to work under these stresses. And I don't want my team to work under these stresses. But I guarantee I'm gonna blow them out of the water. And he said, you know, Brian, scrap it, take it out, we signed the deal two days later, and we raised a million dollars at roughly a $5 million valuation. And then nine months later, and for all you entrepreneurs out there and million dollars goes very quickly, just FYI. So nine months later, I call up Greg again, I say hey, Greg, you know, we're we're we got a couple $100,000 bucks left, you know, we're going to need to go for a Series A round. Here's all the you know, you know, updates. And our first seed round, he actually got me on a call with like, 100 different potential investors and 21 out of them came into the round. And so on the Series A, he actually brought in another fund called Poseidon. And they're really big into cannabis. And Emily and Morgan are great people, they're partners. And so we came, we brought them into our Series A round which we raised another 1.5 million at a $20 million valuation. And then we thought we were gonna go for Series B, but instead, I call Greg and said, "hey, you know, I need$850,000 As a series B bridge convertible note, and I guarantee you are going cashflow positive after this point." So this all happened within basically a year's time we raised all this money. And so once we raised that 800 grand the company went on a rocket ship after that, and so that we've raised today 3.2 5 million, we've done over 200 million in sales in eight years. And our investors are very happy with the possible returns that they're going to be receiving

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Love it man congrats on all that definitely you know it's in any negotiation right it's leverage its power it's like you gotta sell yourself and it is I mean as a you know, entrepreneur myself and doing this and even selling to customers are different thing. Like if you're don't show that confidence, you can tell when you're talking to someone. So I think there's like a frame in your mindset to that aspect. And

Bryan Gerber:

The convertible note was that 75 million valuation.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Awesome. Do definitely rocketship. So then the last kind of question that we'll get into that are kind of summary questions here. So yeah, so like just the industry like how's the industry changing? Just want from like a regulation, you know, Banking Finance standpoint, you know, 2023 versus 2015. And kind of the issues we were talking about earlier.

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah. So when we first started, obviously, we only had this subscription box in the eComm. So we were working with first it was kind of funny. So I, you know, unbeknownst to me, I set up a Shopify website and sign up on Stripe, and started processing, you know, money. And I think once we hit, I think it was between 50 and$100,000, I guess something triggered, and you know, we went to the customer success department. And they, I got an email one day, like six months after we launched, and they said, "Hi, who are you guys?" I said, "Hi, we're Hemper You know, we're doing this" and they said, "Well, we, you know, you've fall under our, you know, tobacco products, and we're not going to be able to process any more payments for you." And I told them, I said, I pleaded with them. I said, "Please give me a 30 day grace period, to keep processing and I will find a new processor." So they actually agreed to the 30 day grace period, which is unheard of most people just get shut off without an answer.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

And then the money's in the cloud somewhere.

Bryan Gerber:

So I got the angel that day, right. And so they gave us 30 days. And then we went over to I think it was a company called EPS. And then EPS promises the world. Two months later, they shut us down and we're holding on to like 80 grand, or something like that. Then we moved over to Cardworks. And we they promised was the world again, shut us down again. Then finally, through some mutual connections, we signed up on EVO international payments. And they you know, it was kind of like, like, almost like a fear thing every day was like,"Hey, you got your chargeback ratio went above a quarter of a percent, we're gonna shut you down." It's like, Guys, we can't work like this, like, out of 20,000 transactions, we had 100 chargebacks. We're good, right? Like, there's no risk here. Okay. And obviously, with the reserves, and I think we had a 10% reserve when we first started. And you know, so and they would never release the reserve. And it was always fighting with them to release it. Because you know, as a young business, we need that cash back to keep in reinvesting. And so, finally, you know about it two years ago, we actually ended with Maverick payments. Maurice over there has been awesome, just guiding us through CBD processing, delta A processing, paraphernalia, processing, just everything and really being kind of a pioneer in terms of building those bank relationships. And just allowing, you know, companies like ourselves to just process normal payments, you know, we're not selling anything illegal. You know, it was kind of crazy. So that's why I call it the payment processing, bloodbath massacre. You know, for three years, it was just wild. But surprisingly, we've been banking with Chase ever since we started. And they've never had an issue with us. And you know, I every year when we make the Inc 500 list, I get a nice gift basket. And so they know what we do. And you know, they have no issues. So it was kind of funny how this whole time it was all the processing companies who you know, are shady anyways. The banks are, you know, the ones that actually have something to lose, and they didn't care. So that was kind of the Yeah, whole kind of world of like, just being shut off and money being held and thinking we're going out of business and then finding a loophole and just, you know, honestly, I'm like a very, like, if there's a roadblock, it's like, over under, side, breakthrough, I don't care. There's no Plan B we got to figure this out.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Hey, that's been an entrepreneur right there. Love it, man. Yeah, definitely you can see kind of the regulations loosening up over time and it'll keep clearly there's no stopping it as it kind of keeps going forward as we keep progressing. And society it's just the antiquated ways that industries regulations, Banking, Finance, credit card processors operate and it is what it is at this point. But um, you know, kudos to you and the Hemper team and the HARA team to jump passed it and you guys are killing it. So, this is this has been great. We always end our kind of podcasts that with kind of two questions. So number one, what is for the listeners out there and they kind of emerging brands CPG business owners, what is one do from your perspective and history?

Bryan Gerber:

What is one do a CPG space

Brad Ebenhoeh:

one do, one do and then we'll ask what is one don't.

Bryan Gerber:

One do I would say is going back to my first scenario with the glass and trying to make stuff in the States. You know, I think there's something to be said about having a vision, but being so militant on it that it can put you out of business. In your early days, you need to remain as flexible as possible. Pivot five times; who cares? Right? You're gonna figure it out but if you stay on this one path and that one vision and you can't hear other people's opinions or thoughts, it's not going to go well for you.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Yeah, and I'm sure you still are able to or still think that you know iterating when you need to right like it especially in 2023 I mean, everything goes so fast you'd like literally make a decision three months from now ain't working well. Like what is the point of doing that aspect so highly recommend that as well?

Bryan Gerber:

Yeah, be like water right. Try it and–

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Then what is one don't for the listeners?

Bryan Gerber:

What is one don't. Don't over purchase products. Don't tie up your cash in inventory yet right? I know everyone thinks that they've got a winner on their hands. Do five tests before you do five smaller runs you know piecemeal it talk to your vendors ask them for you know maybe a blanket ship schedule quarterly shipments, you know, don't lose your business because you throw all your money into inventory.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

cash cash is king

Bryan Gerber:

we want to turn that inventory four or 5,6,7 times a year

Brad Ebenhoeh:

you know, definitely agree; cash cash conversion cycle understand it, map it out. Keep it as tight as possible and anything that's in your warehouse is just basically lost money

Bryan Gerber:

And one more do is have really good accounting people on day one

Brad Ebenhoeh:

like yourself

Bryan Gerber:

Yes.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

These are you like were you the one when that was doing the accounting when you started? Or was like one of your partners?

Bryan Gerber:

So I wasn't doing when we first started we hired like a bookkeeper. But what I'll do even today even today, so I just had my fiscal year end was 3/31 I will go through every expense in every category make sure everything is classified properly.

Brad Ebenhoeh:

love it man once an accountant always an accountant right so but definitely I can tell the Accounting and Information System was background I guarantee helped like identifying and mapping out that the the workflow, the inventory systems and things like that. So Well, Brian, I really enjoyed the chat, super cool product offering how you built your business, the challenges, you went through everything from an accounting, finance, operational standpoint. So before we let you go, Where can we find you and your team your businesses? What do you what are we promoting right now it's, it's the listeners can check it out.

Bryan Gerber:

So if you want to check out the Hemper awesome products that would be Hemper.com If you're in the cannabis industry and you're looking for a solutions partner, that would be harasupply.com And if you want to reach out to me brian@hemper.co

Brad Ebenhoeh:

Awesome, Brian, thanks again for your time again, Episode 31 of The Month End podcasts, Brian Gerber, from hemper and Hara take care, Brian. Thanks.

Bryan Gerber:

Thanks, Brad.

How Bryan built the manufacturing piece that he is known for
Operational overview of how Hemper and Hara scaled, with lessons along the way
Challenges navigating the regulations of selling cannabis related items–payment processing, banking, and ecomm websites
Hemper's workflow to manage inventory
How Hemper raised their cash and earned investments
How the industry is changing in regards to regulations across payment processing, etc.
Bryan's CPG business "do"
Bryan's CPG Don't
Bryan's bonus CPG Do