What started with an R&D project to pressure-test vape hardware has grown into a successful, multi-state cannabis company selling nearly 200,000 1-gram vape cartridges per month.
“I was still living in Florida at the time and my brother was living in Colorado, so we were testing our vape cartridges with CBD, shipping them back and forth from altitude down to sea level and back again,” says Bonanza Cannabis owner and co-founder Corey Keller, who started the business with his younger brother, Conlan, in 2018 and set his sights on a vape cartridge “that could stand the test of time.”
“Up until that time, no one trusted full-gram cartridges because of issues with leaking,” he says. “We were extremely confident to say, ‘This is going to be a cart you can trust.’ … Failure rates are still big in the industry, but our failure rate is below .01%, so it’s not even on our radar at this point.”
Today, Bonanza manufactures a variety of different vape cartridges, but the 1-gram size remains its best-seller, with sales of about 100,000 per month in the company’s home state of Colorado.
Over the past three years, Bonanza has also launched in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and, just recently, New York.
In addition to the quality of its products, the company has capitalized on brand recognition, thanks in part to a distinctive wooden tip on its cartridges.
“People don’t even have to learn the name Bonanza,” Keller explains. “They say, ‘I can’t remember the name of the brand, but it had a wooden cartridge tip.’ And the budtender goes, ‘Oh, I know which one it is.’ It’s still a wow factor to this day.”