Hi there, and welcome to The Dealers Diary - my musings on the cannabis industry, California, and building Halara.

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In today’s entry: Quick Hits | The Website Rebuild | Cannabis Pouches? | In-Store Displays

Hey Dealers,

We rebuilt halaracannabis.com from the ground up last week. Not a facelift—a full tear-down. New framework, new structure, everything.

Here’s why. We spent a few weeks studying how the best brands in cannabis (and outside of it) present themselves online, and we realized our old Squarespace site wasn’t doing us any favors. We looked at how Grüns does their clean DTC layout, how the best product pages are structured so people can actually find what they’re looking for, and how some companies use real customer voices instead of stock testimonial quotes.

It was honestly a lovely exercise, because you start to see patterns in what makes a site feel trustworthy versus what makes it feel like a brochure.

Then we pulled our own SEO data and found something interesting. People searching for us by name—“Halara near me,” “Halara cannabis”—we’re showing up fine. We’re actually outranking the yoga clothing company called Halara on some of those, which is kind of funny.

But people searching for what we actually sell—“resin sauce,” “live resin carts,” “best vape cartridges California”—we were invisible. Completely. That’s roughly 90% of the market we were missing. People who would love our product but have never heard of us.

So the new site has 225 pages (the old one had 52). Every strain has its own page. Every city we’re in has a store locator. We built out a whole Learn section with articles on topics people are actually Googling. We brought in video reviews from Karen, Angie, Cannaseur on our products real people saying real things, not just marketing copy.

And we structured the whole thing so that when someone searches “what is resin sauce,” there’s a chance they land on our site instead of a competitor’s.

It’s live now. Go poke around and tell me what you think: halaracannabis.com

Meanwhile, 4/20 is less than a month away, and I’m doing my best to stick my head in the sand about it. Every cannabis brand on earth is gearing up for their big moment, and I’m over here rebuilding websites and obsessing over search rankings.

I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s always fine. (It’s never fine.)

Onwards and upwards,
—Malcolm

Cannabis pouches are becoming a thing. You've seen Zyn take over the nicotine world. Now a few companies are testing THC-infused pouches. Same format, tuck it in your lip, discreet, no smoke, no vape. We're watching this closely and honestly? Part of me is intrigued. But before we go down that road would you actually use one? Hit reply and tell me. If enough of you say yes, that changes the conversation entirely.

We're building in-store displays. If you've ever bought Wyld edibles, you know their wooden shelf displays — clean, branded, impossible to walk past. That's the standard we're looking at. We're working on custom Halara displays for dispensaries, something that makes the product pop on the shelf without
needing a budtender to explain it.

@westsideuncc posted his first Halara reel on Monday and we can't stop watching it. This guy brings a completely different SoCal energy that had the whole team cracking up. We've been quietly building a crew of people who actually use the product and have something to say — not influencers reading a script off their phone. Karen, Angie, Cannaseur, and now this guy. If you watch one reel this week, make it his.

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Halara · Emerald Triangle, CA

What I'm listening to this week. Full nostalgia mode: