BRAND BUILDER | Miss Grass CEO Kate Miller built an online educational community of more than 100,000 users who collectively informed her company of what products to develop as well as where and when to launch the now monolithic Miss Grass brand which spans seven states, generates more than $1 million per month, and is operated by a team of just 15 people.
BRAND BUILDER | Miss Grass CEO Kate Miller built an online educational community of more than 100,000 users who collectively informed her company of what products to develop as well as where and when to launch the now monolithic Miss Grass brand which spans seven states, generates more than $1 million per month, and is operated by a team of just 15 people. With operations in seven states, sales of more than $1 million per month and a team of only 15, Miss Grass is exemplifying a business model built to sustain the future of the industry.
And CEO Kate Miller has done so without having to deal with the licensing, production, testing and myriad other obstacles plaguing cannabis businesses.
“We’ve outsourced what we feel isn’t our bread and butter,” Miller says.
Miss Grass is simply a brand — one that has garnered a tremendous amount of interest and loyalty over the years.
Miller started Miss Grass in 2018 as an online educational community primarily targeting women interested in cannabis. From there, the company built a rapport with the community, which is now about 100,000 strong, learning what kinds of products they were interested in and mapping out where in the U.S. the community was the strongest. By the time Miss Grass launched its first products in 2020, the company had a built-in, geo-targeted audience informing the company exactly what products to launch and where to launch them.
Annual sales have increased by 2,997% since launch, Miller says.
“From a business strategy perspective, we have always felt that what we do best is build a community and market really high-quality products that are very much informed by that community,” she says.
A New Jersey native, Miller was first introduced to the cannabis industry after moving to Los Angeles to attend USC. While working as a budtender in 2007, she noticed that virtually no products were being marked toward women at the time. She bought the MissGrass.com URL in 2008 and, after a decade in the entertainment industry, returned to cannabis to find that there was still plenty of room to build a women-centric community.
“We started Miss Grass on a bit of a unique path in this industry where we focused on first building and scaling a national community through an online media platform before we launched our own product,” Miller says. “So, when we enter these new markets, from day one, we market to a community that has already been following the brand.”
The fanfare doesn’t begin and end at launch into a new market; Miss Grass maintains an ongoing dialog with each market, hosting events and responding to community feedback.
“These markets are not fixed; they’re dynamic,” Miller says. “We’re constantly investing in our markets to make sure that we’re top of mind.”
Aside from Miller, an operations director and a small brand team, the majority of the company’s employees are representatives for each state market.
The model has allowed Miss Grass to enter new markets with considerably less risk than many other multi-state operations because of the low overhead and zero licenses. The benefits of having a built-in audience, a track record of success and a shelf-ready brand are compelling offers for many licensed producers, Miller says.
Miss Grass products, which include a variety of pre-rolls, flower and gummies, are now available in Arizona, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey and New York.
New Jersey holds a particular place in Miller’s heart.
“My consumption has evolved, but I smoked my first blunt there, so being able to bring it back home and offer Miss Grass products to Jersey folks has definitely been a fun full-circle moment in this journey for me,” Miller says.