Steph Vrona, Founder of HighDef Studio – Interview Series

Even though state markets generate hundreds of millions—if not billions—in annual recreational cannabis sales, building and retaining a loyal customer base remains a steep challenge for retailers. Heavy competition across almost every product category, combined with strict advertising restrictions on platforms like Google and Meta, severely limits how dispensaries and brands can build rapport with consumers. While deep menu discounts and generous loyalty programs can attract first-time shoppers, driving sustainable sales and long-term customer retention requires a much more comprehensive strategy.

To explore the common hurdles dispensaries face when building a strong customer base—and the best strategies to overcome them—MyCannabis.com spoke with Steph Vrona, Founder of HighDef Studio.

Prior to entering the cannabis industry, what roles in sales and tech did you have? What would you say were the most universally successful customer service and team management strategies that you learned during that time?

I wasn’t in sales or tech, actually. I worked in staffing for a few years before I got into cannabis, on the administrative/marketing & IT side. The staffing agency I was with did a little of everything: office, manufacturing, warehousing, IT and behavioral health staffing. I started in administration and fell into project management under the guise of Database Admin/IT catch all person. On that journey, filling gaps, I picked up staffing marketing, some web design, and helped digitize our processes within our applicant tracking system.

I didn’t manage a team there, but as an employee I learned what makes one work. I’m an SOP and process person. If a task only lives in someone’s head, it leaves when they do. Staffing also taught me to take care of the people closest to the customer. In a dispensary, that’s your budtenders. We wouldn’t sell a single thing without them.

What had your experience with cannabis been prior to working in the legal industry? Did cannabis provide relief to you or your loved ones in any way?

I fell into cannabis completely by accident. I didn’t know a single thing about the medical cannabis industry before I started at a dispensary. I didn’t even know Illinois had dispensaries. A staffing manager told me she’d placed an accountant at a dispensary, and they were looking for someone to build websites. She asked if I’d be interested, and the answer was, “Hell yes.” That’s how my retail marketing career started.

From your experience working in marketing roles when the Arizona market first opened, how advantageous was that time for brand building and awareness? How could a brand most effectively get the attention of so many new potential customers?

When a market first opens, I really believe you don’t get that opportunity twice. There’s so much excitement and buzz, and it’s what everybody is talking about. It was a great time for paid ads because everything was performing.

I worked in retail marketing, so for us, the brands that helped promote and hype the dispensaries carrying their products made a big difference.

Testing was the other big thing. Arizona started requiring lab testing on medical cannabis in November 2020, right before adult-use sales started, and a lot of brands failed. We had almost no flower on the market. If even one brand had their stuff together and kept flower on the shelves, it would have been a totally different story for them.

So if you’re a brand, your first impression really is your shot, especially with someone who doesn’t have any cannabis experience yet.

Following up on that, how did you best utilize your strategies and job duties during those first few months of recreational sales in Arizona? How did you most effectively build rapport and customer loyalty during such an important period of business?

My knee-jerk reaction was to start off on the right foot and lead with the same education you would in a medical market. In truth, most canna-curious people don’t want the education, and it’s not even that they’re not interested. It’s like someone who’s newly 21 coming in to pick out their first bottle of wine. If you start talking to them about the grapes, their eyes are going to glaze over. It’s overwhelming. They have 500 products they’ve never heard of to pick from, and you have no idea what makes one different from the other other than price.

So instead, we led with the experience. Beyond asking what they’re comfortable consuming, we asked questions about their plans. What kind of experience were they going for? Then tried to match them with the right products. 

We built rapport from the beginning by being a resource for our patrons.

What inspired you to create HighDef Studio? How did you want to further help cannabis businesses with their customer retention and rapport building?

When I sat down and really started building out what I wanted to offer dispensaries, it came from loving this industry and from one of my biggest frustrations in it. The only thing anyone ever seemed to care about in marketing was how much new traffic we were driving to the store. The board wanted to see new customers go up every month. They needed more and more because we weren’t making money off the people we brought in beyond their first visit, and that first visit was heavily incentivized. There’s only so much new traffic out there. There are only so many people who live in your area, and only so much advertising you can do.

I’ve had my hands smacked my whole career for getting involved in other departments when my department was marketing. It wasn’t until after I started HighDef Studio that it clicked for me: I do marketing operations. At the time, I thought I was just trying to make things easier between departments so we could communicate and execute together. What I was really doing was fixing the foundation. I was building our customer journey, defining what behaviours we wanted to see more off and setting up the support to encourage them.

So many dispensaries are bootstrapped. I’ve been a one-woman show at most of the cannabis companies I’ve worked for, and the only thing that got me through was being ridiculously organized. With HighDef Studio now, it’s beyond retention. I help you do more with less. I want dispensaries to be able to hire more people instead of running multi-state brands with a marketing team of two. Until then, we need everybody in their own boats, rowing in the same direction so we can measure what is and is not working. 

What were the largest issues with building lasting customer bases that you noticed cannabis clients regularly having? What are usually the common initial causes of these retention leaks?

The biggest issue I see is that patrons don’t have a reason to trust them or to come back. Nearly every retailer I’ve worked with or talked to is discount-dependent. Very few know what sets them apart from their competition, and even fewer lean into it. There’s no customer journey set up, so they’re not meeting patrons where they are or encouraging the behaviors they want from them.

I feel like it starts when dispensaries get so focused on sales metrics and on what their competition is doing, they stop thinking about what the patron wants. Marketing becomes crazy reactionary. Promo calendars are chaotically built and usually alongside what the closest competition did last week and is repeating this week. 

The other cause is not knowing who they’re talking to. When I ask who their target demographic is, a lot of times the answer I get is, “It’s everybody. Everybody smokes weed.” An amazing variety of people consume cannabis, but from a marketing standpoint, it can’t be everybody. If you’re speaking to everybody, you’re speaking to nobody.

How do you apply the wildly successful strategies you created with many well-known Arizona companies when you’re working with HighDef Studio clients? How does having such an extensive career in specifically cannabis marketing allow you to have a better understanding of the issues your cannabis clients face?

I have to laugh a little at “wildly successful strategies,” because at the core, what I do is build foundations so dispensaries can own their strategy. Funnier to me, though, is that Arizona is one of the hardest places for me to launch my programs. The race to the bottom makes it near impossible to build a loyalty program that competes with daily promotions without taking a loss.

What I bring to clients isn’t really an Arizona strategy, it’s my whole career. In the Midwest, advertising regulations were so strict they handicapped me, so I had to get creative. One of my favorite examples is scratch cards. During the medical days, they were one of the few things we were allowed to do. As long as I followed gambling laws, we could run scratch cards for whatever we wanted, and they were a hit! They’ve been a hit everywhere I’ve brought them since.

I’m celebrating my 10th year in cannabis this year, and have to say my time on the floor, in the dispensary, talking to budtenders is what helps me understand my clients better. Cannabis is the most restrictive industry I can think of for creative marketing, so I’ve leaned really far into the fundamentals. Some of my best work is giving operators a reality check. You can’t have a budtender helping part-time and expect the same results you’d get from even one person fully dedicated to marketing. Realistic expectations play a huge role in shaping your day to day team morale. 

Particularly within cannabis businesses, why are loyalty/rewards programs so truly vital towards continued repeat business and returning customers? Besides the obvious of customers getting discounted or free products, why is it such an effective strategy for guaranteeing customers come back?

A lot of my programs do include discounts and free product, but they don’t have to. That’s the retailer’s choice. 

Margins are often tight, and a good reward doesn’t have to be more dollars off the purchase. You can do experiential rewards like movie tickets, collectible swag or exclusive access. A loyalty program is the value retailers can provide to the patron beyond the discount.  

As someone who has worked with other industries, why would you say that marketing and brand building in the cannabis industry is so unique compared to those tasks in other industries?

I actually wouldn’t say it’s unique. I think that’s a mistake the cannabis industry makes, thinking we’re so unique. Cannabis is like any other commodity. Consumer behavior and purchasing habits are similar, and they can be tracked. It’s part of why I study other industries and pull ideas from them to execute in dispensaries.

If anything, the most unique thing about cannabis is how restrictive it is. Even on my side, I’m not plant-touching, but because my content speaks to regulated retailers, it gets suppressed across the internet. When I talk to wellness centers or med spas, I have no issue.

Even with all the great work you and HighDef Studio do, what do you think will be ongoing issues related to dispensary customer retention, or new issues that may arise over the next few years of the American cannabis industry’s operations?

I want to say AI. Everyone seems to be shoving it into our tech stack, and now there are even AI-first marketing agencies. So far, in my experience, it’s (somehow) made these platforms worse to work in.

My concern is what all of it is being trained on. We’re already running crazy lean teams, and the AI slop flooding the market is painful. I get doing what you can with what you have. I’m in the same boat, and I use AI to help with my own admin work.

What worries me is that we’re barreling toward automating our customer journeys with AI, without doing the foundational work that would enable any type of success. Once people opt out of your messaging, it’s incredibly hard to get them back in.

Thank you for joining us, Steph! For more information on HighDef Studio, please visit its website.