Pier 36 was buzzing on Oct. 21 and 22 as Hall of Flowers returned to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for its second New York show. On a sunny, 60-degree opening day, more than 200 exhibitors packed the show floor, and buyers from 500 licensed stores had signed on to attend, according to Hall of Flowers. Outside, food trucks lined the pier and a smoking lounge sat right on the water. The energy ran high but focused. and returning faces from across the country traded handshakes and worked deals in every aisle while cannabis culture network The Plugg TV filmed interviews.
Inside, the show wore New York on its sleeve. Queens-born artist Craig Costello, better known as KRINK, designed its visual identity, and his dripping blue “NY” splashed across a wall on the show floor. The crowd looked the part, too.
“The fashion you see here is very New York,” said Spencer Hemingway, senior business development rep at True Terpenes, a terpene supplier founded in Oregon in 2016. “You kind of feel like you’re walking in the city.”
Hall of Flowers launched in California in 2018 and made its New York debut at this same pier last October. If year one was about California arriving in New York, year two felt like the city setting the tone. When Cannabis Now asked exhibitors and buyers what makes the cannabis scene here feel like New York, their answers kept circling back to three things: hustle, homegrown pride and customers who know their stuff. And many of the people describing New York’s accent came from somewhere else.
Fast Talk, Real Business
Mark Zatta, senior brand manager at Zig-Zag, is from just across the river in New Jersey, and he noticed the difference right away. “It comes down to the people,” he said. “These are my people, even just down to the way that people talk. It’s a lot different here than it is in other places of the country.”
That directness carries into business. “New Yorkers can be blunt, but it’s just because we’re all trying to get what we need to get done and get home,” Zatta said. On the show floor, he added, that made it easy to get down to brass tacks with buyers.
Hemingway sees that same pace shaping the market itself. “Everywhere you go, you feel that hustle and bustle,” he said, “and I feel like that translates to the market.”
Robert Everdeen is co-founder and chief creative officer of turn, a brand that keeps its name lowercase to signal “consumer first, turn second.” For Everdeen, New York’s energy never really clocks out. “The streets in New York are quite literally buzzing, like 24 hours a day,” he said, “and that carries into the people and how they show up here at Hall of Flowers, or at the dispensaries.”
Grown Close to Home
If hustle is how New York moves, local is what it buys. Alex Davis, general manager of Exotic World, a Binghamton dispensary opening Nov. 1, is building his shelves around upstate brands and steering away from big mu
