In light of some recent events and false narratives we’ve been hearing from people within the industry, it’s time to set the record straight about the history of Interchange.
I want to be very clear and transparent about the origins of Marijuana Venture’s signature event series: Interchange was the brainchild of Marijuana Venture founder and publisher Greg James. Period.
Nobody else was involved in developing this concept. Nobody else, outside of a small handful of Marijuana Venture employees, was involved in bringing Interchange to life in 2016, and those employees can be counted on one hand.
Anybody suggesting otherwise is full of shit.
We’ve had the benefit of publishing Marijuana Venture in conjunction with hosting Interchange, helping us not only market our own events but also documenting the journey in a print publication read by thousands of people every issue, as well as being published online. It’s also available through a few dozen libraries that carry the magazine, including the Library of Congress.
Greg and I launched Marijuana Venture, the magazine, in March 2014. Our first issue, as we’ve recounted numerous times in this publication, was an eight-page black-and-white newsletter that went out to about 4,000 cannabis business license applicants in Washington state.
Greg started developing the framework for what would become Interchange in mid-2015. In fact, we sent a letter to the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board (then known as the Liquor Control Board) in July 2015, trying to get them to sign off on our vision for an event we believed would be held in November of that year. Because things tend to move slowly in cannabis, we ultimately held our first Interchange in June 2016 and published two articles on the inaugural event in the August 2016 issue of Marijuana Venture.
The first Interchange event was held at the Renton Pavilion in Renton, Washington in June, 2016.
“We’ve decided to stay out of the trade show wars,” Greg wrote in his monthly editorial. “However, we did see the need for an organized buyers market, and this resulted in Marijuana Venture’s Interchange event in June. Modeled after similar events in the media world, Interchange is a simple concept: For two days, vendors and buyers have a series of private meetings scheduled every half hour from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a break for lunch. We wanted to keep our first Interchange relatively small and manageable by limiting it to 25 retailers and 30 vendors. It was a huge success, and the feedback we received from both buyers and vendors was extremely positive.”
Although our Washington events have grown substantially in size, the basics have remained remarkably similar for more than nine years.
Kristina Green, who worked at Clear Choice Cannabis at the time and has participated in numerous Interchange events over the years after joining Greenside Recreational, said that first event was an “awesome experience to sit down and talk with vendors without store interruptions.”
“We get to learn more about their product when speaking to them in a business setting outside of the store,” she added in a story I wrote in the August 2016 issue.
To the absolute best of our knowledge, Interchange was the first event of its kind, a cannabis networking event based on a speed dating format with pre-scheduled meetings.
In 2022, after hosting 10 Interchange events solely in Washington over the course of the previous six years, we expanded the event series into Oregon and Michigan through a partnership that eventually broke up. Without notice or our approval, our former partners launched their own event series, based directly on the Interchange model we had provided and overseen. To be clear, this was not a rebrand of Interchange, and we have no affiliation with those events.
Keep in mind, in addition to the challenges of complexities of running a successful business in the cannabis space, I had just been diagnosed with cancer. I had more important things on my plate and bigger fights to fight. Now healthy, I’m more able to help our team look at new markets, such as our debut event in Massachusetts in early September.
Since our first Interchange, we’ve hosted more than 30 industry events. Some, such as the Retail and Dispensary Expo in Portland, Oregon, have come and gone. Others, like Interchange, have remained solid through the years, while we’ve also added new concepts, such as our Indie-Change series, focused on craft producers and smaller retail companies in Washington.
And we plan to continue bringing the industry together for years to come. Stay tuned as we have some big announcements coming on this front in the near future.