A R TI C LE
BRITISH CANNABIS
®
5 YEARS IN THE UK CANNABIS INDUSTRY AND WHAT IT HAS TAUGHT US. As I sit down at our farm in Portugal on a Saturday morning, one thing that has not changed in the last 5 years is how busy we still are. It’s rare we get the opportunity to take a step back and realise what we have achieved. It’s been monumental, yet we can get consumed in the day to day running of the business and sometimes it’s easy to forget what we have done and how far we and the industry have come. There is enough already to fill a novel, but being on this journey I can easily summarise some of the key milestones that has seen an industry blossom as a direct result of the levels of passion in the individuals that have populated it.
MAG
The early days We entered the CBD industry in 2015 when there was not really an industry to talk about. You could fit all the companies currently trading, round a boardroom table and the general public hadn’t really heard of CBD. We launched the Canabidol® range of CBD products and they were an instant success. We saw significant revenues from our primary channel, which was Amazon, feedback on the products was unbelievable. I guess this was the first time we really comprehended the unquantifiable potential this product could have. Annual sales on Amazon were in excess of £1 million after 3 months of trading and we took advantage of the uncompetitive organic search opportunity. We were ranking number 1 for all the top search terms. We also started to get the product into retail stores across the country. Then came the first of many issues. As CBD products were not supported by Amazon, they closed our account overnight. We lost the biggest sales channel we had and were owed a 6-figure sum by Amazon which threatened our future. It took us 12 months and some costly legal bills to recover that money. While this was a major obstacle, we continued to build our direct sales and retail network of resellers.
