This article originally appeared in the October 2017 print edition of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.
In Washington’s highly competitive cannabis market, carving out a niche and gaining recognition is an uphill battle for many growers. Armed with a vision for craft cannabis and a Swedish name that translates to “harvest,” SKöRD Marijuana has beat the odds and built a dedicated following since its first sales in early 2016. Grower and owner Joshua Andersen talks with Cannabis Business Times contributor Jolene Hansen about what has led SKöRD to this point and what lies ahead.
Jolene Hansen: Tell us about SKöRD and your core team. How did that come together?
Joshua Andersen: We’re a Tier 2 craft cannabis producer. Our [focus] is more on the exotic or boutique strains of weed. We’re growing about 4,600 square feet total right now, indoor. We have 15 employees.
It was an idea of my mother and I, and then basically started as a family operation. It’s run by me, my dad, my uncle, and then we have one partner, Ron Goldman, who is not a family member. That was the core group.
Originally, we were going to build a greenhouse on property that we owned, but that didn’t work [out because of zoning restrictions], so we switched to a location in downtown Vancouver. That was when they were changing the distance you could be from a school, so we lost that location. We ended up buying another piece of property and building a facility from scratch in Battle Ground.
In the process of having to build our own building and buying property, the anticipated investment obviously skyrocketed. It was mostly my parents’ [investment]. They had some commercial property and owned another business, and ended up basically selling off everything to do this.
Hansen: What was the team’s cultivation background?
ANDERSEN: I was an automotive mechanic and just a medical grower for personal use. My parents owned a medical billing company, and then Ron Goldman was a commercial tomato farmer. Hugh Woods, [my uncle], was a plumber.
It was my mom’s and [my] dream. It was mostly my dream as far as the vision of what the brand would look like and the type of cannabis we would grow, but I did have a supportive team. With my dad’s carpentry background and then the plumbing background and farming background, we just had a nice group of people that came together, and we got to put together a really quality facility. We did a lot of the work ourselves.
Hansen: What set you apart from your competitors?
ANDERSEN: There were a lot of challenges, but we had a strain that we brought in called Nightmare Cookies from Sin City Seeds that just was a huge success, and people loved it so much that we couldn’t grow enough of it. It really sustained us for a long time, to get the rest of our strains out and finish building our brand and whatnot. In all honesty, I guess, it was kind of a lucky strain.
All of our [other] strains are developed in house. We have an extensive strain bank, and we pop seeds and pheno-hunt for all of our strains, so they are exclusive to us. Once we find our strains, we grow out mothers and clones. We don’t take outside material in to grow; … that’s not only for strain exclusivity, but also you just take in other people’s problems by taking cuts from other places.
To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' October issue, click here.
Top photo by Jake Gravbot
