You can take the couple out of Wall Street …
By Patrick Wagner
TALENT, Ore. — Jamin Giersbach managed a computer department for a major health care company on Wall Street before he and his wife, Melissa, decided to move out west for a slower pace of life. The Giersbachs left the crowded metropolis behind in 2005 for Southern Oregon, but the easy-going lifestyle didn’t quite take.
Company: Talent Health Club
Owners: Jamin and Melissa Giersbach
Employees: 8
Location: Talent, Oregon
Top vendors: TJ’s Organic Gardens, Proof Cultivar, Dirty Arm Farm
Together the Giersbachs started Rogue Farmers, a 3,000-square-foot growers supply store in Talent. Since opening, the store has more than doubled in size and is now among the largest grow stores in the Pacific Northwest.
“What started off as something that was going to be incredibly small and basically run just by me and Jamin is now a multi-million-dollar business,” Melissa said.
Rogue Farmers inadvertently became a backdoor into the cannabis industry. The cannabis growers who had bought supplies from Rogue Farmers were adopted as vendors when the Giersbachs opened the Talent Health Club medical dispensary.
Located next door to Rogue Farmers, Talent Health Club features a 1,450-square-foot sales floor with three points of sale, a velvet-roped area for medical patients and a rotating gallery of local art stretching nearly 30 feet from the floor to the ceiling.
“We are going to actually have an express checkout lane because I know that some people can really camp out at the register,” Jamin said. “We have a lot of regulars — repeat customers that just know what they are looking for and just want to get in and get on with their day.”
The company plans to add digital displays, sniff jars of product and racks of industry-specific clothing to peruse.
Above the sales floor is the Giersbachs’ office where they manage Talent Health Club, Rogue Farmers and Highly Distributed, a wholesale distributor that supplies more than 140 dispensaries with product from local growers and processors.
“To be successful I think competing against yourself is the best way to keep people honest,” Jamin said. “I have a lot of exclusivity here that I set up early on with some of the best growers in the state. I set brands up with our wholesale company and our wholesale company now sells to all of the other operations around here in Southern Oregon. It really keeps me on my toes and keeps me working hard to search out all of the other hottest products and to bring them down south.”