GROWING GREEN DOT LABS | Within the past year, Green Dot Labs has pulled off both a major rebranding project and the Colorado-based company’s first out-of-state expansion, launching products in Arizona in September 2025. CEO Alana Malone has guided the company through more than a decade of challenges and successes, including this past year of ‘strategic upheaval.’
GROWING GREEN DOT LABS | Within the past year, Green Dot Labs has pulled off both a major rebranding project and the Colorado-based company’s first out-of-state expansion, launching products in Arizona in September 2025. CEO Alana Malone has guided the company through more than a decade of challenges and successes, including this past year of ‘strategic upheaval.’ From an outside perspective, the idea of starting a business at the exact same time as starting a family might seem like an overload of stress and responsibility.
But for Alana Malone, who co-founded Green Dot Labs with her husband, Dave, in 2014, that combination helped provide an odd sense of balance.
“It kind of had us hyper focused on what matters,” the CEO says. “It made us super aligned to make sure we had a healthy environment at home to support the intensity of work, as well as a healthy environment at work so we can bounce back every day and be grateful for what we do.”
Fast forward to today and the competing challenges of motherhood and running a business are no less daunting than when Malone joined the industry, first as part of Colorado’s caregiver program, then with the official launch of Green Dot Labs in 2014 as a licensed medical cannabis company, followed by its transition to the adult-use market in 2017.
“It comes and goes in chapters, I would say, depending on what’s happening in the business and at the home front,” she says.
There are moments when life and business can feel “stable and balanced,” she says, but the latest chapter in the Green Dot Labs story is one of strategic upheaval.
The Colorado-based company is in the process of undertaking two major changes. One is a significant brand overhaul, modernizing the company’s look, doubling down on authenticity and quality and allowing more latitude within its product architecture. The other change is expanding into Arizona, bringing not only the company’s techniques, technologies and brand into the new market, but also its genetics and members of the staff.
Malone says company leaders in cultivation, extraction and operations moved from Colorado to Arizona to ensure the expansion is successful, with the soft launch happening in June and the official launch scheduled for Q3.
Both changes — the rebrand and the expansion — have been in the works for a few years. Although Malone recognized the rebrand had to happen, she calls it one of the riskiest things Green Dot Labs has ever done.
“To just change something that’s working is not really in our nature,” she says. “But we had to set ourselves up to tell our story in the right way and have a conversation with our consumers that we weren’t having under the old system.”
Almost simultaneously, the expansion into Arizona is part of a plan of “scaling responsibly.” While other companies were growing as fast as possible, Green Dot Labs took a measured approach. The company started with just two people and 2,000 square feet of cultivation more than a decade ago, focusing exclusively on concentrates, due to Colorado’s early regulations. Now, the business employs 150 people and has 80,000 square feet of cultivation. Along the way, Green Dot Labs achieved milestones as Colorado’s top-selling live resin brand and top-selling live resin vape brand, then quickly becoming one of the most coveted flower brands in an over-crowded market.
“We always wanted to be who we are today,” Malone says. “We’ve really become the flower brand we saw ourselves as back before we started the company. Genetics are a big aspect of that. Our genetics are exclusive. Our genetic library is our own. So these products, these flavors, these experiences can’t be found anywhere else.”