For project two, I have decided to focus on the wholesale side of the cannabis industry. The idea is to look forward, and predict how the market will shift once federal prohibition ends, and the limitation of the current industry are lifted. I am calling the project “Karma Box,” and the primary goal of the product is to connect retail establishments to wholesale cultivators.

Currently, supply is a perpetual problem for retailers. During the hot summer months, demand from consumers tend to peak, but the heat will often lead to damaged crops, which creates a major bottleneck for retailers. Even when this is not the case, there is often anxiety amongst retailers to ensure that they keep enough high quality product stocked on their shelves. Also, because this is an expiring commodity, it isn’t as though retailers are able to just stock up to protect against market changes. They need to constantly look for wholesale connections that reliably provide product at the correct time.

On the wholesale side, it’s difficult to gauge the market for a given product. The anxiety of holding on to stock for too long and letting it expire hangs over a lot of these cultivators. On top of this, the skill of growing cannabis is very different than the skills needed to sell the product, and yet most of these cultivators are left to find buyers for their product on their own. It is also time consuming, and with the current market, fraught with logistic and legal risk.

When I looked at problems plaguing both sides of the supply and demand problem, my first thought was to look at what changes in a totally legal market, which many predict will happen in the next decade (or even sooner). One major change will be the ability to use postal services to ship product around the country. By having open access to the full national market, wholesalers will no longer be forced to exclusively sell locally and can look to a broader buyer base. Also, the ability for both sides to openly seek one another out has major implications as well. However, in order to buy cannabis effectively, it requires in person inspection. The smell and smoke properties of the product are just as important as the way it looks, so any solution to this problem needs to address this as well. Knowing all of this, I came up with Karma Box. The way it works is retailers first subscribe to a subscription package. Once subscribed, these retailers would receive a sample box of dozens of different cannabis strains and specialty products. They can touch and sample each product, and then go online and order bulk amounts of the products they like the most. It will be shipped directly to their door within a couple of days. Wholesalers will be incentivized to give excellent deals on the samples being sent out to wholesalers, and specialty products will often give products for free in order to market their product.