Janelle Mucci, VP of Retail Operations at Root & Bloom – Interview Series

Because successful retail operations are vital to the cannabis industry, it is highly beneficial for a department manager to have years of prior retail experience. In a sector as massive as cosmetics—where brick-and-mortar stores remain essential to sales—professionals develop many transferable skills that apply directly to dispensary operations.

One such professional is Janelle Mucci, VP of Retail Operations at Root & Bloom, who transitioned from cosmetics to cannabis and brought numerous successful retail strategies to the Massachusetts market.

What topics did you mainly study at Lesley University? How did those studies spark your interest in holistic wellness not just in your personal life, but as a profession as well?

I went to Lesley thinking I’d become an art therapist. I left with something better — a framework for understanding people from every angle. Holistic psychology gave me the perfect blend of what I loved: art, wellness, and human behavior, wrapped around a business management track. I was interning with a Reiki master on one side and studying organizational psychology on the other. 

I joke that my degree is unconventional, but I use it every single day. Long before cannabis wellness was a conversation, I was learning that the mind, body, and how we treat people at work are all connected. That foundation is what I bring to everything I do.

What were the most valuable lessons in effective retail and team management while working at the makeup giant that is LUSH? How is retail in the makeup/cosmetics industry different from retail in other industries, including cannabis?

Lush was the greatest education I could have gotten straight out of college — and I mean that. The model is unique: each store operates as its own freestanding business. You own your P&L, you own accountability of your team, and there’s no one to hand things off to. It teaches you real accountability from day one.

What made it even more powerful was that behind that autonomy sat a network of 250+ stores you could learn from and lean on. That combination — independence with community — shaped exactly how I think about leadership.

When I came into cannabis seven years ago, the contrast was stark. Cannabis was still figuring itself out. There was no playbook. A lot of people got hired simply because they loved weed — which is great, but it’s not a retail strategy. Customer care and team development weren’t priorities yet, and honestly, it showed.

That’s the gap I’ve always tried to close. Passion for the plant matters — but so does the experience of the person buying it. I’ve always believed it has to be both. 

What were some successful ways and strategies that you exponentially increased the overall sales at the LUSH stores that you oversaw? In retrospect, why do you believe those strategies were successful?

It all comes down to experience. Genuine customer care is increasingly rare, and when someone walks through your doors, you have one shot to make it memorable. Lush built its entire identity around that — the wow factor. You walked in and could smell, touch, and try everything. Get your hair dyed while testing a face mask. That’s a sensory world, and it works because people remember how a place made them feel.

Cannabis makes that harder. Customers can’t even handle the product before purchasing — that’s a real constraint on the experience. So you have to get creative. You compensate with everything else: display tables that engage the senses, compelling visuals and video throughout the store, and most importantly, a team that brings the energy the product can’t. The team is the experience.

That’s what I carried over. The strategies that worked at Lush weren’t really about makeup — they were about making people feel something. That translates anywhere. In cannabis especially, where trust and education are already part of the sale, creating a moment of genuine connection isn’t just good hospitality. It’s what drives people to come back.

After so many years in cosmetics retail, what inspired you to join the cannabis industry? What professionally interested you about leaving the stability of the cosmetics industry and working in the still pretty new Massachusetts cannabis industry?

My bread and butter has always been building from scratch — setting up systems, shaping teams, creating something out of nothing. After eight years at Lush, I was ready to get uncomfortable again. I needed a blank page.

But honestly, cannabis wasn’t a random leap. I wrote my senior thesis on the medical applications of cannabis for Parkinson’s disease. My mom had just been diagnosed, and I wanted to understand everything I could about plant-based pain management and holistic medicine. That research wasn’t just academic — it was personal.

So when the Massachusetts market started taking shape, it felt less like a career pivot and more like the universe pulling me back to something I’d always believed in. Holistic wellness, building something new, and a cause worth fighting for — it checked every box.

Stability is comfortable. But I’ve never done my best work when I’m comfortable. Cannabis needed people who understood retail, culture, and customer experience. I had that. And I genuinely cared about the plant. That combination felt like exactly where I was supposed to be.

What were the most drastic ways that you had to alter the regular retail operations at Ayr  during the COVID pandemic? How did you successfully implement those changes so quickly?

As a medical cannabis operation, we were deemed essential, and our doors stayed open through all of it. Business boomed at exactly the moment you didn’t want it to. The foot traffic was real, and so was the fear — for our team and our patients.

We lost a huge chunk of staff almost immediately, and I couldn’t blame a single one of them. So, we hired like crazy, which turned out to be one of the unexpected gifts of that season. People were leaving decades-long careers overnight — lawyers, teachers, musicians — looking for something new and meaningful. Most of them are still in the industry today. Some of my best hires ever came from that window.

Operationally, we rebuilt on the fly. Transactions were being processed in hallways. We stood up a full delivery program in two weeks — got a van approved, hired and trained a team, and got product safely on the road to patients in a regulated, compliant way. Two weeks.

How did we do it? No days off, a lot of helping hands, and honestly — sheer fear. There was no time to overthink anything. You just moved. Looking back, that period taught me more about operational agility than anything else in my career. 

During the seven years that you’ve worked in the Massachusetts industry, what are the most notable ways that the state industry has changed? How have you had to adapt to those state industry changes over the years?

Seven years in Massachusetts cannabis feels like seventy. The pace of change is relentless — and yet, zooming out, the regulatory framework still moves at a crawl, especially at the federal level. That tension defines the industry.

On any given day, a regulation update can change how you label a product, how you train your staff, how you process a transaction, or how you report your inventory. Add federal prohibition on top of that — banking restrictions, tax burdens, no interstate commerce — and you have an industry that demands extraordinary adaptability just to survive, let alone grow.

What I’ve learned is that adaptability has to be a hiring criteria, not an afterthought. From day one, we share with every candidate: if you need a fixed blueprint to feel secure, this isn’t your industry. We build strong processes — absolutely — but they exist to be updated. The operators who’ve struggled in Massachusetts are the ones who treated early frameworks as permanent. Nothing here is permanent. 

What are some of your regular duties as VP of Retail Operations at RoadTrip Dispensary in Salisbury? How do you find clever ways to sell products and have the dispensary stand out among its competitors?

As VP of Retail Operations, my primary focus is retail expansion — but what that actually looks like on a day-to-day basis is rarely the same twice. One day I might be deep in workforce planning or coaching a manager through a difficult situation; another day I’m analyzing our product mix, reviewing loyalty program performance, or sitting in on a vendor meeting to evaluate new offerings. The through-line is always the same: make sure the team is supported, the customer experience is strong, and we have room to grow.

When it comes to standing out competitively, I think about expansion in layers. There’s the physical footprint — identifying opportunities to grow our retail presence — but there’s also the more immediate, day-to-day work of deepening our relationship with existing customers. That means building loyalty programs that actually feel rewarding, creating incentive structures that drive return visits, and being intentional about our product mix so we’re meeting customers where they are, whether they’re brand new to cannabis or longtime enthusiasts looking for something specific.

In a market like Massachusetts, where dispensaries are competing heavily for the same customer base, differentiation comes down to experience and trust. I focus on making sure our staff is knowledgeable and confident, that our merchandising tells a clear story, and that every touchpoint — from the moment someone walks in to the follow-up after a purchase — reinforces why RoadTrip is worth coming back to.

How have you utilized your many years of retail experience with LUSH and the cosmetics industry and applied those skills and lessons to your roles in the cannabis industry?

My decade-plus at LUSH was honestly the foundation for everything I do now. At first glance, cosmetics and cannabis might seem worlds apart — but when you peel it back, the parallels are striking. Both industries sell products that are deeply personal, that require a real conversation between the staff member and the customer, and where education is everything. You can’t just put something on a shelf and expect it to sell itself. The customer needs to understand what it does, why it works, and why it’s right for them.

At LUSH, I developed a consultative selling culture — training teams to ask the right questions, listen actively, and guide customers toward something that genuinely fit their needs rather than just pushing a top-seller. That philosophy translated directly into cannabis. A budtender who can have a real, confident conversation about onset time, consumption method, or the difference between cultivators is doing the same work a great LUSH associate does when they’re helping someone navigate skincare ingredients. The product changes; the human skill doesn’t.

From a leadership standpoint, LUSH also taught me how to build and retain passionate teams. That brand attracts people who care — about the product, the ethics, the customer — and managing that kind of staff means leading with purpose, not just process. I’ve brought that same energy into cannabis, where the best employees are often deeply mission-driven and respond to that kind of leadership.

And then there’s loyalty. LUSH built an incredibly devoted customer base not through traditional advertising, but through experience, values alignment, and word of mouth. Cannabis is the same way — especially in a regulated market where paid advertising is limited. The dispensary that wins long-term is the one that makes customers feel seen, educated, and valued every single time they walk in. That’s something I learned early in my career and have carried with me ever since.

What are the most common issues that your clients with Grass Ceiling Retail Cannabis Consulting deal with? What are usually the best remedies or courses of action for those issues?

The two things I see come up most consistently are compliance gaps and customer experience — and honestly, they’re more connected than most operators realize.

On the compliance side, Responsible Vendor Training is a Massachusetts requirement for every cannabis agent, but for a long time the available options felt disconnected from what actually happens on the dispensary floor. Staff would sit through a training, check the box, and walk away without feeling any more prepared for a real customer interaction or a difficult situation. That gap is exactly what inspired me to build GrassCeiling’s RVT program. I wanted to take everything I’ve learned from years at the retail level — the grey areas, the judgment calls, the moments where policy meets people — and turn it into something teams could actually use the next day. The training is on-demand, so operators aren’t scrambling to schedule sessions, and it’s built around real scenarios rather than abstract rules.

The second issue — customer experience and consultative selling — is where I see so much untapped potential in cannabis retail. Many budtenders are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about product, but they haven’t been trained to have a real conversation with a customer. They default to rattling off THC percentages when what the customer actually needs is someone to ask the right questions and help them find what works for their lifestyle. That’s a retail skill, not just a cannabis skill, and it’s something I’ve spent my entire career developing and teaching.

The remedy in both cases comes back to the same thing: investing in your people. Compliance doesn’t have to feel like a burden, and selling doesn’t have to feel like a push. When your team is trained well — with real context, real scenarios, and real confidence — everything else follows. 

What do you predict will happen with the Massachusetts industry in the next few years? How do you envision the industry and customer sales trends will further change in the upcoming years?

I think we’re at a real inflection point in Massachusetts cannabis — and honestly, I think that’s a good thing. My prediction is that we’re going to see significant policy changes move quickly, while at the same time the pace of new license approvals starts to slow down. On the surface that might sound like bad news, but I actually see it as the industry maturing and self-correcting in a way that’s long overdue.

We’ve had a period of rapid expansion — new dispensaries opening constantly, everyone racing to grab market share — and what that’s created is a crowded, competitive landscape where a lot of operators are struggling. Slowing down the licensing pipeline gives existing businesses the breathing room to actually get good at what they’re doing. Stop the bleeding, tighten the operation, and build something sustainable. The dispensaries that survive the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones that opened first — they’ll be the ones that invested in their people, their customer experience, and their ability to adapt.

And that adaptability piece is critical. Policy in this industry can shift fast — compliance requirements, packaging rules, delivery regulations, social equity mandates — and the teams that are rigid or resistant to change are going to find themselves constantly behind. The operators who build a culture of flexibility and continuous learning are the ones who will be positioned to thrive no matter what the regulatory environment looks like.

From a customer trend standpoint, I expect to see continued growth in convenience-driven purchasing — delivery, express pickup, streamlined loyalty rewards — as well as a more educated consumer base that’s moving away from just chasing high THC numbers toward products that actually fit their lifestyle and needs. That shift puts even more pressure on dispensaries to have knowledgeable, consultative staff rather than just order-takers. The bar is going up, and the businesses that are already investing in training and customer experience are going to be very well positioned.

Thank you for joining us, Janelle! For more information on RoadTrip, please visit its;;;;;;;;;; website.