How Swade Navigates Market Trends at Scale with Treez

Location: St. Louis, MO metro area

Founded: 2020

Mission: To share their love for precision in premium cannabis with every individual via an informative approach in an inviting atmosphere.

The Challenge

As Swade stood up 5 medical dispensaries in a newly booming cannabis market, their growth was inhibited by a POS system that wasn’t built to scale and a cashless payment solution that required substantial manual work to maintain.

The Outcome

By migrating to a highly flexible point-of-sale with open APIs and an integrated PIN debit solution, Swade has been able to streamline their tech stack and operations across all 5 retail locations and triple transaction volume.

Going from 0 to 100, FAST

Long before they had five retail dispensaries in the St. Louis metropolitan area, Swade began as a CBD and hemp company, holding one of only two licenses to sell to medical groups in the state of Missouri.

Seeking the opportunity to become a vertically integrated retailer, Swade applied for every license type–cultivation, manufacturing and dispensary–hoping to get one of each. From there, the bureaucratic gods smiled–or maybe smirked–down upon them and suddenly, Swade found themselves with a total of ten licenses: ten licenses that would need to be stood up fast.

As most folks in cannabis have seen first-hand, the industry moves quickly…sometimes. Amidst a flurry of fundraising, location scouting and team recruitment, their initial retail buildout started in January 2020, and we all know what happened shortly thereafter. What was initially expected to be a 6-8 month buildout turned into nearly two years before all five stores would be up and running, due to health and staffing concerns throughout the course of the pandemic.

Each retail dispensary under the Swade umbrella has its own unique character and offerings tailored to the community demographics. They pride themselves on their integration within each community they’re a part of, prioritizing a genuine care for their relationships with patients and businesses in their area.

State vs. Tech: Navigating the Pitfalls

When Jack Haddox joined the Swade team as their Director of Dispensary Operations in June 2020, he dove head first into writing standing operating procedures (SOPs), managing all hiring and getting their tech stack in order. Cannabis retailers in Missouri must choose their point-of-sale (POS) system from a list of approved providers that have been vetted by the state, which at the time did not include Treez. From the options available, Jack selected Cova as their POS.

Unfortunately, over time, Cova’s weaknesses became more apparent and increasingly impactful. “Cova kept putting us out of compliance,” Jack says. From not registering sales properly to not reporting transactions in Metrc, Swade found themselves with mounting inventory issues that put their business at risk. At one of its worst points, Cova accidentally oversold to about 300 patients, requiring Swade’s team to track down each individual patient number, what product they purchased and how much was sold in order to rectify the issue.

As Jack was responsible for Swade’s entire retail tech stack, he also grew frustrated with Cova’s inadequate integrations with their ecommerce, marketing and analytics providers, not to mention a plethora of hardware issues. According to Jack, “When we were with Cova, half to three-fourths of my day was just trying to fix integrations and trying to get the barcode scanners to work.”

Additionally, Swade’s use of a non-integrated cashless ATM solution gave their customers a payment option that minimized the handling of physical cash, but left their team to clean up the messes left behind: “It was always a nightmare. Our accounting team would have to go line-by-line, transaction-by-transaction to deduct the difference in cash every time,” in order to reconcile their POS, cashless ATM and the cash in the vault.

Government-Vetted, Business Approved

After months of making due with insufficient software, Jack got some great news: Treez’s SellTreez POS was now approved for use in the state of Missouri. Jack had been pleased with Treez’s software and service when he had worked with a multi-store operator in Michigan, so he didn’t hesitate to schedule a demo.

There, Jack saw solutions to many of the business problems he had been trying to solve, leveraging Treez’s capabilities across compliance, inventory control, integrations and reporting. The availability of integrated cashless payment solutions via TreezPay stood out, too, as it would allow them to minimize the amount of time their accounting team spent on reconciliation while providing a truly cashless experience: “We had a cashless ATM system since day one, but cash is messy.”

In November of 2021, Swade made the POS switch from Cova to SellTreez. Within 6 months, they also implemented TreezPay’s integrated PIN Debit solution for cashless payments to bolster their revenue and enhance their customer experience.

— Jack Haddox, Director of Dispensary Operations, Swade

Operational Acceleration Station

Since implementing the SellTreez POS across all five retail locations, Swade’s concerns about compliance are a thing of the past: “Treez keeps us compliant 99% of the time, while with Cova we almost never were.” When it comes to inventory management, Jack can now easily track which team members are doing what, and which products are being moved where.

“We run the five highest volume stores in the St. Louis area, so having accurate inventory is critical.” Jack credits these improvements, in part, to Treez’s 2-way integration with Metrc, which allows SellTreez to stay seamlessly in sync with their state compliance tracking system.

Additionally, Treez’s integrations with Swade’s other technology partners have worked without a hitch. “Having a completely open and cut API has been super helpful to us,” says Jack, as it allows them to integrate with all of their preferred providers to enable more efficient and effective personalized marketing, online ordering and omnichannel fulfillment for their customers.

As a vertically integrated retailer with multiple stores, gaining access to reliable and pertinent data and analytics to enable quick business decisions has been key to Swade’s continued growth. SellTreez allows Jack to easily track inventory performance to inform purchasing and how their budtenders are performing to enable sales incentives, as well as to dig deeper into their own products’ sales to identify which strains to continue producing.

To inform high level strategy, Jack has been able to cut the time he spends on compiling reports for his executive team each week by about 80%: “Before, it would take 5-6 hours every time, because Cova was painfully slow. With AskTreez, it takes only 1-2 hours tops, and that’s with much more information available compared to what we had with Cova.”

By dropping their non-integrated cashless ATM in favor of TreezPay’s integrated PIN Debit, Swade is now able to offer their customers a truly cashless payment solution akin to a traditional retail experience, all for a fraction of the cost of competing solutions that charge as much as $3.50 plus 3% per transaction. It’s been well received, and the numbers show it: on a weekly basis, between 50-70% of their transactions at each store are paid using PIN Debit, and they’ve seen a 25% increase in average order value. “Integrated PIN Debit has been awesome. The in-store staff loves it, and the accounting team loves it.” Jack says it’s helped them rake in the tips, too: “Our budtenders see a higher tip rate with cashless payments vs. cash. Our average tip amount has increased from $3.40 to $7.50 per tipped transaction. It’s made all of our lives smoother for the most part.”

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

With less than a year on SellTreez and TreezPay PIN Debit under their belt, Swade has more than tripled their monthly transaction volume, and they’re just getting started.

As the Missouri cannabis industry looks toward the vote on adult use legalization this coming November, the streamlining of Swade’s operations with Treez could not have come at a better time. Hundreds of dispensaries across the state organized to collect enough voter signatures to get the measure on the ballot, and Swade was a big part of that effort to empower continued growth for the entire industry.

If all goes according to plan, recreational cannabis will be available in the state starting February 8th, 2023, and Swade has their eye on explosive growth.

How does Jack see Treez supporting their growth goals and needs? “The biggest and most important thing to ask for from a POS system: ease of scalability.” Jack trusts Treez to provide the uptime and support they need to scale effectively, along with the open API platform to customize their tech stack along the way.

As they encounter potential growing pains along the way, thankfully Jack and his team have been able to lean on Treez for the support they need, when they need it. “Between bi-weekly calls with our dedicated Customer Success Manager and access to 24/7 help from the Treez support team, we’ve experienced responsiveness and resolutions with a level of urgency unlike what I’ve seen with other POS providers,” says Jack.

“Having worked in other retail stores, having a good POS makes or breaks you. Getting into cannabis, I expected cannabis-specific systems not to work well. That wasn’t the case with Treez; I don’t have to worry about it.”