This CEO found herself dissatisfied with the cannabis options available to her, so she created a brand: Nidhi Lucky Handa of LEUNE

LEUNE is a California-born lifestyle brand on a mission to elevate cannabis culture and the conversation that surrounds it. Through purpose-driven plant products that meet the highest quality standards, LEUNE is designed for everyone — seasoned pot fans and newcomers alike.

As LEUNE’s founder and CEO, Nidhi Lucky Handa is a WOC entrepreneur and cannabis consumer, who found herself dissatisfied with the options available to her and sought to create a brand that would appeal to a wider demographic, not just men and "super stoners." Now hailed as a "Woman Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Weed" by Forbes and a "Woman of Weed" by High Times Magazine, Nidhi has dedicated her career to building a cannabis company that will raise industry standards for workplace culture, representation and social equity. 

We sat down with Nidhi to learn more about how she started her brand and advice she has for building a career in the cannabis industry:

High Herstory: Nidhi, it’s an honor to speak with you. We greatly admire your work to disrupt the cannabis industry and raise standards for equity and inclusion. Can you tell us more about your journey founding LEUNE and what makes your brand different? 

Nidhi Lucky Handa: My journey is similar to a lot of others in that I came consumer first. I was living in LA during recreational legalization and was super excited to go to the dispensary and buy legally. I've been a consumer since I was a teenager a lot of people.

I was so excited to see what the experience was going to be at a retail level and was really disappointed to quickly be like - “Hey, where's me and all of this”?

There were seemingly a lot of brands that were focused on men, or I would say leaning into the stigma of, of weed and anything that we should as an industry, be trying to like a hurdle that we should be trying to get over. On the other end of the spectrum, it was all wellness brands, which wellness is a valid vertical. I'm a consumer of it, but it's a niche. I love the challenge and a puzzle and I guess have a little bit of a proclivity for liking to sort of figure things out that aren't totally clear. So that's kind of, it that's really the Genesis of what got me inspired to think about starting a brand. 

I think the other piece is, is that I got to market really fast.  I started conceiving of this idea in the spring of 2018 and we launched the brand in November of the same year with force. So in hindsight, I think that if the path had been longer and if the brand didn't take off as quickly as it did, I don't think I would have known what I know now about how complex this industry is and how complicated everything is. I think that there was a little bit of ignorance is bliss that got me off the ground. Fortunately, I was focused on spending my money on things that I see now were very critical, like compliance, understanding the regulatory environment, really putting a focus on the brand. At a moment in time when everyone was telling me brand doesn't matter in weed, nobody cares like, you know, deli-style is the future and I don't think I was the only one clearly, but many of us did not agree with that.

It's a hard industry to get any sort of forward momentum in, but I think it was a combination of timing and that I wasn't focusing on a lot of the things that my peers were. I was focusing on completely different things that seemed really irrelevant at the time, like consumer arc and creating an architecture for the brands that made sense and would be built to sort of reverse engineer for scale. 

I was very, very interested in that from the beginning. To me, California was never going to be the be-all end-all. It was always like, okay, if I'm going to take this brand to all of these other states and all these other countries in the future, how am I going to build it, to do that?

Understanding that the regulatory environment is so volatile and different everywhere. That how I started. You know, I don't like to over-romanticize anything because I think it doesn't help anyone. I spent a lot of my time in mentorship, you know, mentoring other people. We tend to glamorize the way that things happen. It’s equal parts luck and a lot of hard work. And also just doubling down on the things that you really feel passionate about. Either you're going to be right, or you're going to be wrong. Either you're going to stick to your guns or you're gonna pivot These are the decisions that are going to determine your outcome. 

Then, you know, just honestly the universe, because this industry is bananas and there's a lot of things that none of us can control. So, you know, cannabis wasn’t deemed essential during the pandemic, I think this industry, would look a hell of a lot different right now.

High Herstory: We are still getting over the fact that you conceived the idea for LEUNE in Spring of 2018 and launched in market in November that same year…seriously impressive.

Nidhi Lucky Handa: Thank you. There were a few things that I was very passionate about. One was I wanted the brand to be vertical agnostic, meaning I don't want to be that vape brand or that, you know, gummy brand, I want to be that cannabis brand. And that was really a practical thing. I mean, you know, the counterargument to that is. You should be a specialist and not a generalist, right?

We're in such a weird industry where storytelling in cannabis right now is very chill, wag the dog. It's like, what are you, what are we allowed to sell in it in a specific regulatory environment versus what's the best product for the consumer? Everything is a little bit backward. So that was one thing I was very passionate about.

The other was I wanted the brand to be very IP driven and the architecture of the brand speaks to that. So everything inside LEUNE is our own IP, this word loon, I made it up. I won the federal trademark for it. I was like watching all these other brands and watching a lot of the bad actors in our industry, stealing IP from CPG brands and I mean, I think any of us who have operated a day of our life outside of, weed know that there's only so long that it's gonna work for. When the lawsuits started coming down. 

Outside of that, I felt very passionate and I still do, that the brand is not female. I don't believe in this gendering of the weed business. And I feel very like impassioned by it. And I think it is the feminist in me that feels that I think we pay the pink tax at the drug store because of that. LEUNE for me was always about being smart and thinking about, hey, if we know that women make 80% of the spending decisions in the American households but we're in an industry that is very dynamic in that we've all been socialized for the last few decades to not interact with the transaction of weed. I think most women can relate to this. Like I've been consuming since I was a teenager, but I was always taught like, no, no, let your boyfriend deal with the drug dealer. You consume it, but don't deal with the person selling it. 

That hurdle is something that we get over very quickly in every market but it screws up the data. So it gives this very wrong impression that you know, this is a some heavily weighted male consuming industry. It's like, no, it's not, it's heavily weighted. This is an important data point that starting to become more clear. But as a result, we got a lot of brands that were hyper-targeted to men or fewer that were hyper-targeted to women. 

LEUNEis very much like the people I could care less what your gender is. I could care less, like as long as you're of legal age, like I think that the brand stands for what it stands for. We're mission-driven super aesthetic, super creative, but there's never going to be this thing about it. Gender or exclusion at LEUNE. And, you know, I see the virtue for certain products being that way, but certainly not what I was interested in building it LEUNE.

We think a lot about the consumer, I think because we're all consumers and we all are heavily invested in this notion that the 3.0 consumer doesn't see herself yet in our industry.

High Herstory: How do you see the 3.0 consumer? 

Nidhi Lucky Handa: You know, I think now it's funny. I see that I've been talking about this for a long time and I'm starting to see this phrase being used a lot more now, and I think we're there. So if you think about the 2.0 consumer, the one that we've been marketed to for the last couple of decades is, you know, is the meme of the guy just super stoned on a sofa with his belly hanging out and eating a big pizza, right. That meme is exclusionary, and that has shaped the way that we think about, and I don't think the sophistication has necessarily been there historically, but it has shaped the way that we've thought about branding use case consumer arc because we're just catering to that one, consumer that in one sort of archetype of the consumer.

I think the 3.0 consumer is often new to legal weed, meaning these are not people who have never tried the plant, but they wouldn't describe themselves as daily or professional users. I also don't think these people are canna-curious, meaning. Sure. They're curious, but they're also like consuming. Just having a hard time finding themselves in the product they're, you know, often being fully employed and, you know, don't have the sort of financial hiccups of waiting till Friday, payday to buy weed, which again, factors into the marketing piece, right?

Because if we're all building brands marketing to the same one person and the same demographic we're leaving everybody else out. And I think the sort of the middle lane, the masses, the people who are eager to get past the stigma curve, over the hump of weed being like a taboo thing and ready and willing to bring cannabis into their daily world or dealing consumption habits.

They're struggling to see themselves. They struggled to see themselves in the marketing. They struggled to see themselves in the product types. They struggled to see themselves because we're not doing a good job as an industry, or historically we haven't, we're doing a lot better job now. I'd say in the last 12 to 18 months, things have really, they feel different particularly out here in California.

It's interesting because particularly as a woman, it's very easy for me to have these conversations with investors and for those conversations to sound very pie in the sky. But the reality is they're very backed up by data. You know, data suggests that if we're going to build an industry that is solid and that can carry itself forward, we need to be investing in consumers that are able to consume regularly.

When you're building any kind of brand or any kind of business, the best evangelist you can have is your customer. To earn the respect of somebody who's willing to consume your product. Not just once, but again, and again, that's a privilege that I think we all should be taking a lot more seriously, you know, and I, I certainly do at LEUNE.

When we think about the 3.0 consumer, we think about that person who's very eager to consume but might not have the time, or might even feel intimidated by the dispensary experience and might not understand right out the gate the difference between resident rosin might not be super tuned into what their dosage is for an edible. But they want to be. 

I go to dispensaries all the time and I'm constantly surprised by the narrative of budtenders often not understanding that their consumption habits are probably not the same as the consumers, right?

We still don't understand why two people that have the same height and weight have completely different tolerances. I'm somebody who consumes cannabis pretty much on a daily basis. And my tolerance for say an edible hasn't really grown past five milligrams. I've got coworkers who have similar sort of body type and all the other things that you would think would play into metabolism who are now being able to tolerate 40 milligrams at a time, right? 

The education piece and the ability to not shame the consumer at the dispensary and give them the space. I always remember this story of a friend of mine whose mother was visiting town a couple of years ago. She said, she wants to go to the dispensary and buy some gummies for sleep. This was before LEUNE had gummies on the market. 

And she said, “What should she buy?” I said, “Look for the microdose product. She should ask the budtender about, you know, ratios.” And, you know, at that time the CBN was all the rage for sleep. Even after all those nuggets of perspective, she walked out of there with a thousand-milligram tincture from a budtender. She got so stoned out of her mind because she had no perspective of her tolerance or dosage. It was such a bad experience.

Not only is that a lost consumer. But, that's also a very correctable thing. For a lot of 3.0 consumers, you know, maybe it's like, yeah, I want to go to dinner and I want to be able to take a vape because I'm not drinking alcohol, but it's really important to me that it doesn't smell because it wouldn't be a good look to show up at some dinner with smelling like weed, right?

That consumer maybe has the same hunger appetite tolerance for cannabis as someone else, but use case looks different.

“Similarly, I think a 3.0 consumer often is really eager to figure out how to use cannabis, to make their lives more efficient, not to just zone out. We know this now more as, as we get more data points about cannabinoids and terpenes and all of these things, there's an efficiency to using cannabis. You know, we hear all the time from our consumers, anecdotes about using certain LEUNE products before exercising or before cleaning the house versus using other ones before they go out for dinner or before going to a party.”

It’s the folks who are looking to use weed for many, many different reasons to most enhance their lives versus to check out from it.

High Herstory: What is your favorite product that LEUNE has created?

Nidhi Lucky Handa: Well, I can't show favoritism to any of my children, but I will say this, our gummies, I am, I'm an edible consumer. We did three years doing R and D trying to get that product right. I am extremely proud of the end result. They're rosin-based. I am a believer in the distillate hangover. I think input in edibles in particular makes a really big difference.

And I did not understand it until I really started doing all this R and D work. There's a really big difference in how I feel the next day after a distillate gummy versus rosin-based gummy or a live resin-based gummy. We set the bar very high for ourselves on these gummies. They're gluten-free and vegan and all-natural and all the things.

We heat tested them to 150 degrees because we wanted to make sure they wouldn't melt. Everyone who consumes gummies knows what it's like to buy gummies at the dispensary or get them delivered and they are all melted into one sheet, you know? They are micro-dosed in two into and a half and fives. We just launched one that is a ratio that has THC, CBD, and CBG. I think that most people can tolerate two and a half milligrams and the rosin creates a much softer high because it's a full spectrum experience.