Megan Stone, founder of cannabis retail design firm High Road Studio, has been a medical cannabis user for over a decade. Yet when she first began visiting dispensaries in California, she rarely found herself feeling comfortable or welcomed. These shops just weren’t catering to her, a woman who was far from the stoner stereotypes society had long, often falsely, perpetuated.
Now, Stone helps design dispensaries with accessibility and inclusion in mind, but she’s not the only one who found her early dispensary visits unpleasant. My own first dispensary experience involved a very high man watching cartoons who seemed neither interested in nor capable of answering a single question.
As reports indicate that women are getting into cannabis more now than ever before, we wondered how shops can better appeal to changing demographics. We chatted with Stone, dispensary owners, and cannabis patients/customers to find out what they look for—and what they avoid—in a dispensary.
Don’t Objectify Women
Seems like a no-brainer, but a lot of women just aren’t into seeing posters of women in skimpy outfits smoking joints at their local shop. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a sexy edge to your decor, but you can do it in a way that isn’t using a women’s body just to sell products. For instance, Studio City dispensary TheWEED displays work from local artists on its walls. One such artist is Los Angeles-based painter Nina Palomba, who created five fun, retro, cartoony paintings depicting her relationship with her partner, burlesque dancer Miss Tosh. They’re sexy, but in a playful way that doesn’t just cater to the straight male gaze.
What’s on TV matters, too. Two women we spoke with said they hate going into a dispensary and seeing lewd