Encourage the Gift of Wellness

With the 4/20 holiday approaching, retailers are looking for new products to stock their shelves and send home with customers.

Over Christmas, sales of products like topicals, oils, and other wellness products skyrocketed as holiday shoppers picked up novelty items for themselves and their loved ones. This April, a whole host of new wellness products are available across the country—make sure your customers don’t miss out.

What Types of Products Are Available?

As producers perfect their formulas, more products are coming to market, meaning that products like skincare lines, bath bombs and salt soaks, pain creams, skin-nourishing lotions, soothing teas, and even infused lip balms are now available.

The inspiration behind most of these products is similar to non-infused wellness products, but with the added benefits that cannabis may provide. While some products may be CBD only, like skincare or lotions, it’s generally accepted that for bath products and topicals, balanced formulations with both THC and CBD are, anecdotally, more effective.

Choosing What to Stock

Like any other product that you stock in your store, you should be doing your due diligence. According to Tanner Stewart, CEO and founder of Stewart Farms, sourcing wellness products isn’t too different from sourcing other products.

“Definitely look at the ingredients and how the products are made,” he says. “Just like in non-infused wellness products, there can sometimes be some inappropriate or unhealthy ingredients, so make sure you’re checking out the company and their ethics, as well.”

Stewart says that at Stewart Farms they have a simple thesis when it comes to the wellness products they produce: it has to be great without cannabis in it. Cannabinoids alone are not what makes these products great—it’s the combination of cannabis with the other ingredients like essential oils and nourishing butters that come together to create the final product.

How to Sell Wellness Products

Generally, producers should include product information with their products, but if they don’t, how do you and your team know how to talk about them?

If you’re lucky, you may already have staff who have cut their teeth in wellness retail, but in case you don’t, here are some tips:

1. Use Emotive Language

Get excited about the products! Instead of merely listing off ingredients, or repeating the provided taglines, encourage budtenders to describe the experience rather than the product itself and talk about how they’ll feel afterwards or how their life might change after using it.

For example: “Oh, you’re shopping for your mom? Check out this bath bomb! After a long day, she can sink into a hot bath with one of these bad boys. I tried it after being on my feet here all day, and the lavender, along with the Epsom salts and cannabinoids had me so relaxed. Plus, when you drop it in the water the colours look so beautiful.”

2. Learn About Ingredients

There are loads of great resources online to learn the basics about common ingredients in cosmetics and wellness products. While the focus shouldn’t be completely on the ingredients, it’s important to know what common ingredients do and why they may have been included in the formulation. Having a basic understanding of, at least, the main ingredients will help budtenders match the right customer with the right product.

3. Try Them Yourself

Nothing is easier than selling a product you already love. If you’ve got a bath addict on your team, send her home with an armload of bath bombs, and make her the expert; if one of your staff members is obsessed with skincare, send him home with the newest skincare line and see what he thinks. If budtenders can get excited about a product, you know it will fly off the shelves.

With the right attitude (and product knowledge), this exciting new niche of cannabis products has the potential to add something new and fun into your customers’ lives and diversify the demographics in your store.