Less than a year after an extended city process to vet and choose two legal recreational cannabis dispensaries in Healdsburg, Solful opened its doors at 465 Healdsburg Ave., just three short blocks from the Plaza. It’s in a remodeled Queen Anne house originally built in 1891, now owned by financial advisor David Jones of Choreo, a.k.a. Enso Wealth Management.
On one side is Purls of Joy yarn shop, on the other a driveway to a WestAmerica Bank branch and the local Goodwill, O’Reilly Auto, and Rite-Aid pharmacy and store.
It’s at a crux in Healdsburg, a pivot point of commercial geography between driveable commercial and the walkabout downtown being energized north of the Plaza. “I think it’s what Healdsburg needs,” said property owner Jones in a sidewalk conversation near SingleThread.
“We need to expand the northern foot traffic, and they’re doing just that—they’re pulling the retail north and just expanding it throughout town,” he added. The house has been tastefully remodeled in yellow and green, and the infrastructure upgraded to support the new retail business.
If the public opening of the dispensary was supposed to be a secret, it wasn’t. Even before the dispensary opened at 10am on Friday, with a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored ribbon cutting, dozens of potential customers had lined up on the porch, down the walkway and up the avenue past nearby businesses. The line waxed and waned all the way to Sanderson Ford much of the day. As customers were let in, after an ID check-in, to the 700-square-foot store.
Neighborhood Impact
A cooperative member of Purls of Joy, the handcraft school and business located next door, said some people dropped in they had never seen before, and some made purchases. Maybe the dream of pulling business farther north wasn’t a dream after all.
Turning the location over to a cannabis dispensary was not always Jones’ goal, far from it. Said the lanky, graying onetime City Council candidate, 2020, “I was getting a lot of phone calls from attorneys and owners of other cannabis companies, and I thought, what is going on here?”
He ended up interviewing several, but “was really not impressed with the caliber and quality that I saw.” That is, until he encountered Eli Melrod and Michael Jones, the CEO and COO respectively, of Solful. Jones, not a cannabis user himself, was excited when he saw their retail design and the products they were selling. “And I thought, these guys are perfect. A world-class-caliber cannabis company is what we needed to start off with, right?” Jones said.
A Dispensary for Healdsburg
The crew at the new retail store were well-trained for the opening weekend, and for several it was not their first. They knew what they were doing, and handled the first weekend’s boom with aplomb, guiding about 1,000 customers and the curious amid the tasteful displays and shelves of “product,” the harmless generic word for what was until recently an illegal possession.
“It’s an industry that’s gone from prohibition to legal, essentially at the flip of a switch,” said Melrod, referring to the 2018 legalization of recreational cannabis in California. That flip of the switch led to some attrition in the cannabis industry, among retailers as well as cultivators.
As in other business sectors, Melrod observed,“we see trends [of] consolidation happening at rapid speed … So I think it’s just really trying to understand who you are, what makes you unique and different,” said the entrepreneur. “And for us, we’ve really just doubled down on that,” meaning quality nd education.
“Everything we source is sun-grown craft cannabis from small farmers in Northern California. We work directly with these small farms, and that’s a huge differentiator today,” he said as we toured the fully stocked shelves the day before the store opened.
The Product
The first weekend’s business began the next day, with 1,000 gift bags distributed for the first customers. The included product, priced at a penny each for inventory purposes and delivered in a branded burlap shopping bag, included small containers of dried flower, a THC-CBD tincture, a pre-roll and a gummy two-pack.
But Melrod is focused not on the freebies, but the big picture. There is no indoor growhouse product from the Central Valley or Oklahoma. Affiliated growers range throughout the “green triangle,” Sonoma to Humboldt counties. The emphasis on local sun-grown cannabis, and its related product, is part of a business trend toward premiumization, which came to the cannabis market after the first wave of retail dispensaries, some of which have faltered and closed.
City Business
Among the key benefits of having a dispensary in town, more than one customer observed, was cutting down on VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), a key metric in the city’s goal of reducing greenhouse gasses. The next nearest dispensary is 10 miles away in Larkfield, and beyond that twice that far to Cloverdale.
“We welcome Solful to the community and look forward to continuing to work with them to ensure safe and legal cannabis sales in Healdsburg,” said Andrew Sturmfels, who as assistant city manager oversaw the selection process that took place from March to November 2023.
Revenue from the city’s retail sales tax is expected as soon as the end of November for business conducted in October, Sturmfels said. The tax, as approved by voters in 2022, is not to exceed 8% of gross receipts for cannabis businesses.
Sturmfels elaborated that in May, 2023, the council set the tax for retail recreational at 4%, with no tax for retail medicinal cannabis.
The other cannabis company granted a license last November, Jane Healdsburg, is expected to open at 44-D Mill St. in March or April 2025.
A third dispensary, Mercy Wellness of Cotati, fell short in the selection process and in January filed a lawsuit against the City of Healdsburg. Just last month, on Sept. 11, the county court issued its tentative ruling in the City’s favor to dismiss the case.
That leaves the landscape of legal cannabis dispensaries a settled matter, for the time being at least. Time to kick back and enjoy the view.
I don’t know about reducing vehicle miles travelled. Both Jane and Solful are pretty small-ish dispensaries with fairly limited selection (and relatively high prices), so until more dispensaries open, it’s not going to make that much of a difference.
The fact of the matter is: the dispensaries were picked for their tourist-friendliness. If they were actually interested in the locals’ market, they’d have picked Sparc or Mercy.
Plus: 4% is actually fairly high on the tax front, too.
Again, it makes more sense to drive south, especially if you were heading there anyways.
Is the 4% tax added to the 9% sales tax? Would be nice to know, or is that just understood? The whorehouse used to be just a block north of Solful across Healdsburg Avenue from the Fire Station. Maybe prostitution will be legalized next (fine by me), and the city can tax that, too.