Right here, says Sarah O’Leary, CEO of Jelly Brands, which includes cannabis brands Gal Pals Minis, Original Baked Bingo, and Wacky Weed Tours.
O’Leary points to Ann Arbor’s weed-friendly history (the city’s $5 pot fine and the Hash Bash date since the early 1970s) and abundance of post-legalization purveyors. With twenty-six shops, she texts, the city has “the largest retail footprint per capita I know of in the Midwest and quite possibly the nation … It’s the ultimate cannabis product/brand research and test market.”
Sarah O’Leary’s Jelly Brands teamed up this year with Andrew Sereno’s Glacier Cannabis. Besides growing, packaging, and marketing her Gal Pals Minis, Glacier sponsors her weekly “Baked Bingo” at the Circ bar. | Photo: Mark Bialek
O’Leary moved to town just before the pandemic after a long career advising and leading creative teams for brands like Gatorade, Hershey, and Walmart, and “on hundreds of brands since then in Chicago, New York, LA and Dallas,” she writes. And in the spring of 2021, she invited Dallas friends Mike Courtney and Quyen Nguyen to fly up for her first Wacky Weed Tour. She wanted the married market researchers’ take on whether people would pay to take tours of the local dispensaries that were packaged with discounts.
They concluded that Ann Arborites would. This summer, O’Leary expects to lead her one thousandth person on the chatty, two-hour tour that includes the Diag, Nickels Arcade, the Michigan Theater, and three shops. Tickets are $25 per person, including unlimited return tours.
That policy grew out of her first tour. One man “was getting medicine for his wife who had cancer,” she says, so she invited him to come back wherever he needed to. And inviting people to return “adds to the community I’m hoping to build around cannabis in Ann Arbor.”
The Original Baked Bingo also came out of that first tour. “The idea was all Sarah, but we encouraged her as soon as we heard it,” Courtney emails. O’Leary now calls games every Sunday at the Circ bar on First St. There’s a $10 all-you-can-eat brunch, cards are $20 apiece, and winners get coupons for free cannabis at a sponsoring shop.
Gal Pals Minis hit the market soon after that first tour. O’Leary had noticed that most pre-rolled joints were so big that “people often have to put it out halfway through,” Courtney says. “That’s when she thought about making smaller ones” targeted at women.
“In a sea of Marlboro men, we are Virginia Slims,” O’Leary says. She calls Gal Pals Minis 0.4 gram pre-rolls “energizing giggle weed in a hot pink tin.”
Women don’t want the same cannabis experience as men, she says. While men “want sedating,” women “want to feel elevated without stress and anxiety.” She says she did a lot of testing to find strains that would give women that experience and sized her pre-rolls so that one or even half of one will do the trick.
Cannabis prices have plummeted in the past couple of years, and several stores on O’Leary’s early tours have already closed or been acquired by larger companies. Asked for her take on the shakeout, she emails that the industry “at present walks a bit of a fiscal tightrope. Without federal legalization of Cannabis or at bare minimum federal banking legislation that affords the industry access to federal insured banks, Cannabis companies are at a distinct disadvantage compared to other industries … If a mom and pop Michigan Cannabis shop becomes financially distressed, it can’t count on a bank or government agency for relief. There’s no real safety net in the industry for them.”
Nonetheless, she writes, she’s “extremely optimistic regarding the future of Michigan Cannabis. The market will never be softer than what we’ve seen in the last several months. Those who have survived will come out of it stronger, hopefully with an even deeper understanding of how to deal with market fluctuations.”
She made her own strategic move earlier this year, when she met Andrew Sereno at House of Evolution Dispensary on N. Main. A 2010 U-M chemical engineering grad, Sereno owns Glacier Cannabis, which has a marijuana grow on Bethel Church Rd. outside Manchester.
“She had a lot of energy, and an appreciation for clean cannabis,” Sereno recalls. “It made a lot of sense to combine her cool product with our clean cannabis.”
Some growers, Sereno says, take cannabis that fails testing because of the presence of yeasts and molds and “remediate” it with radiation that kills the living organisms—but that, even dead, can cause allergic reactions. “We don’t remediate,” he says, calling Glacier’s the “cleanest weed in the universe.”
Now it’s O’Leary’s weed, too: Glacier now makes Gal Pal Minis. “They grow the cannabis we use, produce the prerolls, and bring our brand into market,” she texts.
“Right now it’s just a manufacturing agreement,” says Sereno. They’ve discussed consolidating Glacier and Jelly Brands in the future, he says, but for now, “she has her own separate business.”
There’s no set retail price for Gal Pals Minis, but O’Leary says a tin of five typically sells for $24–$27. Despite the market downturn, “no one is discounting our tins,” she texts, “and they’re flying off the shelves. I think it’s because we deliver a real value to women, and they feel it.”
O’Leary, fifty-eight, says she’s “smitten” with Ann Arbor. “I’ve lived in a lot of places, but I love this town,” she says. “This place is magic.”
