Green Dragon founders fired up to “get back to where we were” with new joint

The first dispensary chain founded by Alex Levine, Andy Levine and Lisa Leder is preparing to cease operations in Colorado, three years after they sold it.

But they have high expectations for take two — their new chain, Fired Cannabis.

“Our plan is to get back to where we were,” said Alex Levine. “It’s just a long detour.”

The trio — Andy Levine and Lisa are married, and Alex is Andy’s son — opened the inaugural Green Dragon dispensary in 2014, and the cannabis firm was one of Colorado’s biggest when they sold it in 2021.

But things fell apart after that.

Eaze, the California-based cannabis delivery service that bought Green Dragon, fired the trio in early 2023, and they resigned from the board months later. The year since has featured lawsuits, one of which is still pending. And Green Dragon’s CEO told BusinessDen last month that the company’s Denver grow operation and 17 Colorado dispensaries will shutter at the end of the year.

“Quickly after the merger closed, we realized we didn’t have much of a say,” the younger Levine said. “They didn’t want our expertise at all. They wanted our assets.”

The trio say they’re now focused on Fired, which has seven stores in the works between Denver and Aurora.

“We know how to run a lean operation and be profitable,” Leder said.

In May, they took over three licenses from the now-defunct Altitude Dispensaries. In June, they got another four from Lightshade Dispensaries, which still operates four other local stores itself.

They bought two of the buildings — 10455 E. Colfax Ave. in Aurora and 1568 S. Federal Blvd in Denver — through Leder’s real estate company Best Properties LLC for $2.1 million and $600,000, records show. Fired leases the other five, which are all in Denver.

The dispensaries are open, although renovations are underway.

The three Altitude shops are further along because they’ve been working on them since May. One shop in Aurora is basically finished, save a few minor touches, and the other two should be wrapped up in the coming weeks, they said.

They expect the other four to be fully rolling by the end of the year, pending permitting and delivery.

Alex Levine said they are spending tens of thousands at each location, getting rid of waiting rooms and installing new lighting, signs and display cases. The projects are self-funded, he said, largely because weed’s illegal federal status makes it difficult to get organized outside capital.

“If you could start over, what could you do better?” Levine said. “We kind of get a clean slate and a fresh start.”

That reset starts with product. At Altitude, all the flower was weighed out “deli-style” and nothing was pre-packaged. Lightshade was doing the opposite. Fired will offer both at all their stores to maximize customer options.

All of Fired’s locations will sell food and drink — think gas station snacks such as chips and soda — to keep the munchies at bay, something permitted in Colorado only since May. The store at 12075 E. 40th Ave. in Denver will also feature a drive-thru.

Leder said that weed is a marketable product like anything else, whether it be clothes or furniture or food. Fired, like Green Dragon, aims to squash the dopey-dispensary stereotype.

“We’re not trying to come off like a college dorm room,” Levine said.

The pair said Fired is able to offer lower prices to their customers because of their relationships with cultivators, who are getting “stiffed” by some vendors who don’t pay on time, or at all. Leder and Levine said Fired always pays in full and on time, and doesn’t charge producers for specific spots in the store, something both said is a common practice at other dispensaries.

They have also known most of Colorado’s local growers since recreational marijuana went on sale in 2014. Those relationships are not as strong with four of Colorado’s biggest dispensary brands, mainly because they have been bought by large, out-of-state firms — “Big-Canna,” as Levine likes to call them — in recent years.

Livwell’s 22 stores were bought by Pharmacann, a firm out of Chicago, in 2022. The Cannabist Company, a publicly traded conglomerate based in New York City, purchased Green Solution’s 23 dispensaries and six grows in 2020, back when it operated as Columbia Care. That same year, Schwazze, another publicly traded company in Denver, acquired 13 Starbuds locations. They recently bought the remaining five they did not own already.

That’s on top of the tumultuous Green Dragon-Eaze situation over the past three years.

Levine characterized the new versions of the titans as “cold and overly corporatized.” He said they see the marijuana industry as a way to print money and don’t consider the nuances necessary to run a profitable business.

Levine compared growing a cannabis operation to starting a restaurant.

“People don’t open a restaurant because they think they’re making money,” he said. “It’s because they think they have better recipes than everyone else and can provide a better experience than everyone else.”

Levine dropped out of Tufts University in 2012, after Colorado voted to make recreational weed legal in Colorado, to start Green Dragon. His mother-in-law Leder, whose background is in real estate, bought various grow and retail shops to bypass landlords that did not want the liability of renting to what, by law, was a criminal enterprise in the eyes of the federal government.

Soon after, the older Levine, who has a background in business, jumped on board too.

“It was very small initially,” Alex Levine said. “And it kept growing and growing and became a family affair.”

People have been buying less marijuana in Colorado. Sales peaked in 2021 at $2.2 billion and this year’s numbers sat at $948.5 million through August, according to the state’s department of revenue. If that pace holds the rest of this year, the industry will post its worst figures since 2016.

But Leder and Levine believe the “doom and gloom” attitude toward the industry is overblown. They still see opportunities, although they noted Fired’s footprint will have to be more thoughtful than Green Dragon’s.

Denver has issued nearly 300 dispensary licenses. But Aurora has 24 total for its 400,000-person population, the city told BusinessDen.

“The intention isn’t just to stop with these seven. We want to expand as fast and get as big as we can,” Levine said. “We’re pretty fired up.”

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