4 Ways to Curate and Organize Your Cannabis Products so Customers Can Easily Find What They Want and Need

The following is adapted from Breaking the Stigma.

By Charlena Berry

I love Target. They are one of the merchandising masters of the traditional retail world. I can walk into a Target to get towels and end up walking out with towels plus a matching shower curtain, new soap dispenser, snacks, dog toys, and a number of other odds and ends. Through the sheer power of merchandising, Target can turn a planned $50 shopping trip into a $500 one.

This is in large part because Target excels at two major components of merchandising: product selection and product display. In terms of product selection, they’ve found the profitable middle ground between affordability and quality, offering cheap but chic products. They’ve thought of everything you might need for your home and daily life and brought it together in one place.

As you walk through each section of Target, you can notice the ways in which the merchandising is geared toward a certain type of customer. Menswear looks a bit different from womenswear, the toys section is built with kids and parents in mind, and so on. They create mini customer experiences inside of the store while still tying everything together with the larger Target brand, creating a seamless transition from one department to the next.

As retail giants like Target show us, your products and how you present them are a critical part of the customer experience. This is especially true if you are a cannabis retailer. Rather than just putting anything on the shelf, you can implement some strategies—which I’ll share with you here—to curate your assortment and organize it in a way that allows customers to easily find what they want and also discover things they didn’t realize they needed until they saw them.

#1: Curate by Quality

Traditionally, merchandising refers specifically to the display of products in a store, but for displays to be most effective, you must start with a good product assortment. Since cannabis retailers have a large variety of customers, we must be particularly thoughtful about choosing our products.

In curating your selection, first and foremost, you must identify quality products. You should have somebody called a merchant in the company who specializes in finding, assessing, and choosing products. The merchant should have an understanding of both industry-wide and store-specific trends in purchasing behavior. 

They should also be able to examine flower and determine the quality of the buds, based on appearance and aroma. They should be familiar with various cannabis “stats” (like THCA, THCB, and CBD percentages) and should be able to read and interpret ingredient lists for edible products. Finally, the merchant needs to have a basic understanding of labeling requirements and common lab testing procedures so they can assure the safety of the chosen products.

In addition to checking product quality during the selection process, you should also perform quality assessment checks of individual shipments. Especially with flower, the quality can vary from shipment to shipment, and you don’t want to accidentally put a bad batch on your shelves.

#2: Ensure Product Variety

After curating for quality, the next step is to make sure you offer variety, in five main areas: product type, strains, price, product size, and target customer.

For example, different customers like to consume cannabis in different ways. So, you want all the major product types covered: flower, pre-rolls, vape cartridges, concentrates, topicals, edibles, and tinctures. 

Within these large categories, you can typically break things down even further. For instance, within edibles, you may want to stock fruit-based products, chocolate products, beverages, capsules, and oils that can be used for baking.

At the most basic level, you need sativas, indicas, and hybrids. On a fine-tuned level, you want to offer different terpene profiles and THC/CBD strengths and have a good selection of popular strains, like Blue Dream and OG Kush.

Remember, too, your customers will have different budgets. Some will be bargain hunters, while others are willing to spend the big bucks in order to get uber high-quality products. To serve them all, you’ll need a variety of price points.

#3: Organize in a Way That Makes Sense

Once you have a high-quality, varied product assortment, you want to present your products in a logical way that takes the customer through the shopping experience. I have found that the two most popular organization methods are by product type and user experience.

One of the best examples of merchandising I’ve seen in the cannabis space took the latter approach. They set their store up like a rainbow, with each color linked to a particular user experience—for example, blue for sleepy time and yellow for energy. Aesthetically, it was incredibly beautiful, and I found that method of browsing delightful. Plus, displaying multiple product types in each color category made it easy to cross-sell.

Organizing by product type also makes sense because many customers come in looking for a particular consumption method. If you organize by product type, you’ll have a section for flower, a section for vaping, a section for edibles, and so on. With this organization, customers can easily see and compare their options. If they want to buy multiple products of the same type but with different experiences, everything will be in one place.

Ultimately, either one of these strategies can be effective. You also might choose an entirely different method of organization. For instance, maybe you want to organize by supplier or by the customer’s experience level, with a section for novices and a section for connoisseurs. Perhaps you have an on-site bakery that you want to make the star of the show. As long as the organization is logical, you have some flexibility here. Use your brand to guide your decision.

#4: Create a Planogram

Once you’ve figured out your layout and organization, you should create a planogram. A planogram is a visual map for how to present your products. Planograms can range from a hand-drawn sketch to a highly detailed map created with planogramming software in which exact product dimensions are taken into account and everything is represented to scale. 

If you have a single store, you can sketch out your merchandising displays on paper, and when adjustments are needed, you can simply rearrange and shift products around. The more stores you have, the more important planograms are to ensure consistency across each store. 

If your merchandising is inconsistent across locations, customers will struggle to find the products they want, which is frustrating. Planogramming software becomes more useful with more stores, especially if your stores are different sizes or have different floor plans.

Ultimately, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to merchandising. Seek to make your merchandising reflect your brand, and experiment a bit to figure out what works for your store and customer base.

Constantly Refine Your Merchandising

Merchandising is not a one-and-done activity. The innovation in our industry is truly out of control (at least in those states without strict license caps), which is amazing. All the innovation means growth opportunities and the potential for big profits. To capitalize on that innovation, though, you need to be constantly adapting and adjusting.

Keep an eye on industry trends so you can forecast and plan for changes in merchandising. For instance, if you opened your store several years ago, you might not have put in a beverage cooler. Today, beverages are more popular, which means you need to think about purchasing a cooler and finding a place for it in your store.

Also be aware of your store’s sales trends. The better you get to know your customers and their purchasing behavior, the better you’ll be able to tailor your merchandising. Maybe your store is in a wealthier neighborhood and your top-shelf products are selling more than the budget products, or perhaps customers have been raving about a certain item in their reviews. You’ll want to adjust your merchandising to reflect those trends.

The retailers who can continuously curate their product assortment and display it with the customer in mind will increase their longevity in the market. So however you choose to merchandise, do it with intention, be logical, and adapt based on trends.

For more advice on how you can curate and organize your products to maximize the customer experience, you can find Breaking the Stigma on Amazon.

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