Woodkirk Stone
Yellowknife-based ReLeaf NT now owns the NWT’s only cannabis sales website after the GNWT closed its own website and pulled out of the market.
Luke Wood, owner of ReLeaf NT, told Cabin Radio why he believed the ReLeaf website could succeed where the GNWT failed.
He said product availability was an area where the GNWT’s website was lacking, making it difficult to compete with the illegal market, which he calls “big competitionâ€.
“I think they had six, seven articles at the end, when I looked on their website, to sell. You need a lot of choice if you want to compete, â€Wood told Cabin Radio.
Beyond the products they carry, Wood said shipping and payment options are also important considerations.
“If we have a store here with a huge selection and you can ship direct, the next day from Yellowknife, it gets to the communities much faster. It’s cheaper, of course, because of the shipping, â€he said.
“And I think [the GNWT’s website] only took credit cards. With us, it is 80% throughput. Thus, a large portion of our customers do not use credit cards. So that could have been a deterrent as well. “
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Below, read the full interview transcript.
This interview was conducted on October 20, 2021. The transcript has been edited slightly for clarity.
Ollie Williams: It must be a pretty exciting time for you.
Luc Wood: He is. We’ve been watching this for a while. They posted an expression of interest to see if anyone had any ideas. They didn’t have a lot of action on their site. So they put out an expression of interest just to see if anyone had any ideas, I think, and would be interested in taking it over. So we had submitted one, there is a list of others as well. And what they did was they made it so that if you are designated as a retailer, you can go online. So anyone can, we did it. But Trailblazer could just as well, and all of the other private stores as they open can go live.
What prompted you to do this? The GNWT website did not perform very well. What made you look at this and think you could move into this space?
The big competition, of course, is the illegal market. If you are fighting against the illegal market, what determines [success] is the availability, selection, price and quality of products. So the GNWT website just didn’t really… have the product available. I think they had six, seven articles at the end. You need a lot of choice if you want to compete. And also, they did a lot of drop shipments wherever they came from. So sometimes the shipping cost was $ 50.
If we have a store here with a huge selection and you can ship direct – the next day from Yellowknife – it gets to the communities much faster. It’s cheaper, of course, because of the shipping. And I think [the GNWT’s website] only took credit cards. With us, it is 80% throughput. Thus, a large portion of our customers do not use credit cards. So that could have been a deterrent as well.
You mentioned the quality of the product. You still have to go through the Alcohol and Cannabis Commission of the Northwest Territories to acquire shares. What makes you confident that you will be able to offer products that make a difference?
When it all started, they were learning too. In fact, they’ve gotten pretty good at it and now they have partnerships with a lot more [suppliers] that at the beginning. At first when we were looking at this it was Canopy Growth, which is like the Tweed product, and Aurora Cannabis. Now, I hardly have any Tweed product in store or Aurora anymore. There is so much more. And it is thanks to all these partnerships that the commission was set up.
So it’s so much better. It’s like anything, it just takes time for people to understand. I mean, I’m learning too, it’s a new industry.
When it comes to quality, you have a lot of money poured into this industry. It’s like alcohol, you know, nobody buys the smugglers anymore. It’s that sort of thing, so as long as the quality goes up – it does – and the price definitely goes down. Every month, everything is cheaper. I think when we started the cheapest we were selling ounces for [was] $ 107 and some. Now, I’ve sold ounces for $ 105, and we haven’t opened for a year yet.
What does this mean for your business? If it takes off, will you need to grow quickly?
Well not really. If you look at the whole of the Northwest Territories – what’s the population, roughly 40,000? It’s a small, small market, overall. And there are stores in these other places. So you basically serve smaller communities that don’t have a store [and] will go online and buy from you. And then how many people in these communities actually use or consume cannabis? So it’s not a big piece. But this is definitely an expansion of the business. We just have to find efficiencies and become good at what we do.
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