I Almost Professionalized Myself Out of My Own Business

A year of listening to everyone else, losing some of my own instincts, and remembering why I started Hippie & French in the first place.

Last weekend, a young woman came into our sale wearing pigtails, pink, fluffy, unapologetically girly clothes.

I noticed her immediately.  Not because there was anything unusual about her, but because looking at her reminded me, almost painfully, of why I opened Hippie & French in the first place.

I wanted to build a cannabis store where women felt comfortable. Actually, more than comfortable. I wanted a place where the store felt like it had been created for them.

Cannabis retail had never felt that way to me. So much of the industry felt masculine, intimidating, clinical or designed around a culture that didn’t particularly care whether women felt at home in it.

I wanted something softer and stranger and prettier. I wanted women working there.  I wanted femme people working there.  I wanted women and queer people shopping there.  I wanted a space where someone could walk in wearing pink pigtails and fluffy clothes and feel completely normal.

For a long time, that instinct guided almost everything I did.  Then I got scared.

The legality of this industry changed. The rules became harder to understand. The consequences of making the wrong decision started feeling much bigger.

And fear does something interesting to your confidence.  You start looking for people who appear more certain than you are.

Over the last year, I hired people because I believed a more complicated business required more serious people around me.

An expensive compliance officer.  Managers. Consultants.  Men, in numbers I had never really worked around in years.  People with titles and opinions and experience I thought I was supposed to defer to.

At first, I thought I was strengthening the company.  Eventually, there were moments when people I had hired were telling me what to do inside my own business — sometimes in front of my entire staff.  I allowed it.  That sentence is painful to write.

There were moments this year when I stood in the company I founded and let someone else publicly position themselves as the authority over me.  It was humiliating.  And I regret it.

Not because an owner should never be challenged. Good employees disagree with owners. Experts should tell you when you’re wrong. Compliance matters enormously in an industry like this one.But there is a difference between listening to expertise and giving away your authority because you’re afraid.

I didn’t understand that difference anymore.

Somewhere along the way, I began assuming that the person who sounded the most confident probably knew more than I did.  The compliance professional knew better.

The manager knew better.

The designer knew better.

The men who had spent more time in certain corners of the industry knew better.

And slowly, the person who had built Hippie & French stopped being the person making decisions from instinct.  I started asking everyone else what Hippie & French should be.

They even had a hand in redesigning my store. And I only did it because they said everything needed to be behind glass.  Again, none of these decisions felt catastrophic while I was making them.  That’s what makes this difficult to explain.

Nobody walked into my business one morning and took it away from me.  I handed pieces of it over.  A little at a time.  And I did it because I was afraid.

Afraid of compliance.

Afraid of changing laws.

Afraid of making an expensive mistake.

Afraid I wasn’t sophisticated enough to run the company Hippie & French had become.  Fear can make outsourcing your judgment feel like responsibility.  I thought I was professionalizing.

Looking back, some of it was a very expensive form of self-doubt.  Then came one of the hardest periods this business has ever experienced.  Public criticism.

People discussing Hippie & French as if the business were already dead while I was still showing up every day trying to keep it alive.  Strangers confidently predicting an ending to something they didn’t build.  And when that happened, all those layers of professional protection I had surrounded myself with didn’t protect me.  The managers didn’t make it hurt less.

The consultants couldn’t fix it.

The redesigned store couldn’t save me.

The titles and systems and opinions didn’t suddenly tell me who I was supposed to be.

Instead, I found myself standing inside a business I barely recognized at exactly the moment I needed to recognize myself.  And then this girl walked in wearing pink.  She probably has no idea what she reminded me of.

She reminded me that Hippie & French wasn’t created because I wanted to become the CEO of a perfectly structured cannabis corporation.  I started it because I had an instinct.  I thought cannabis could feel different.  I thought women and queer people deserved a place that didn’t make them feel like outsiders.  I wanted femininity in an industry where femininity often felt secondary.

I wanted a femme-led space where women, queer people and anyone who had ever felt out of place could walk into a cannabis store and ask questions without feeling stupid.  I wanted it to be beautiful.  I wanted it to be fun.  I wanted it to feel like us.

And somewhere during the last year, I started believing that instinct wasn’t sophisticated enough.  Maybe this year was something I had to go through.  Maybe I needed an entire year of listening to everybody else tell me what to do before I could understand how much I already knew.

Over eight years, I collected a lot of stories.  A lot of tea.  A lot of things that will never make it into a blog, never make it onto social media and probably should stay exactly where they are — inside the memories of the people who were there.

There are moments from this business that no backlash, no bad year and no redesign can touch.And looking back, I wish I had understood that some of the periods I called struggles were actually the years that were building me.  I was so busy trying to get through them that I didn’t always know I was living through the part I would eventually miss.  The difficult employees.  The impossible days.  The strange customers.  The money problems.  The wins that felt small at the time.  The ridiculous conversations behind the counter.  The people who came and went.  The versions of me who thought each new problem was the biggest problem I would ever have.

They weren’t.  But they changed me.  Eight years later, I’m older. Hopefully wiser. Definitely less certain that certainty is something I need.  I still don’t know exactly where I’m going.  But I know where I’ve been.  And I know that even the parts I once wanted to hurry through became part of the life I built here.

That’s also why the eye symbol we’ve started using means so much to me now.  It isn’t just branding.  To me, the eye is about seeing clearly again.  It’s intuition.  It’s knowing when something feels right before you can produce a spreadsheet explaining why.  

It’s paying attention.  It’s trusting yourself enough to listen to experts without disappearing underneath their expertise.  It’s remembering that a femme-led business doesn’t need to become less femme, less queer or less intuitive in order to be taken seriously.  Maybe that’s why writing this feels different.  It feels like I’m finally looking at the last eight years clearly enough to understand what I want to carry forward.

Not everything belongs in the next version of Hippie & French.  Some things were lessons. Some were mistakes. Some were people and systems I needed for a season and don’t need anymore.

But some things are still mine.  The instinct.  The femininity.  The weirdness.  The idea that cannabis could feel more beautiful, more welcoming and more human.

I don’t know exactly what Hippie & French looks like a year from now.  Maybe it becomes smaller.  Maybe it becomes something much bigger.  Maybe one day we’re manufacturing more of our own products in-house.  Maybe one day the recreational market finally opens and the little hemp store I started in 2018 becomes the dispensary I always imagined it could be.

I genuinely don’t know.  But for the first time in a long time, I’m less interested in asking everyone else what the next version should be.  I want to see what happens when I trust the instincts that built the first one.

So maybe rebuilding doesn’t mean becoming more professional.  Maybe it doesn’t mean becoming bigger.  Maybe it doesn’t even mean becoming what the cannabis industry expects a serious company to look like.  Maybe rebuilding means going all the way back to the beginning.

Women.  Queer people.  Femme leadership.  Comfort.  Beauty.  Conversation.  A little weirdness.  A lot of intuition.  And a place where a girl can walk through the door in pink pigtails and remind the woman who owns it exactly why she started.