When Shauntel Ludwig sold her vaporizer company, DaVinci, to cannabis distributor Greenlane Holdings (NASDAQ: GNLN), she pictured taking the brand to new heights. Instead, she found herself buying it back two years later, looking to breathe new life into the struggling business she built from the ground up.
Ludwig, now CEO of Synergy Innovation, have taken on the rebuilding of not just DaVinci, but also the Eyce brand, both of which suffered during their time under Greenlane’s ownership.
“We’re here to repair it,” Ludwig told Green Market Report. “Both brands stand on their own well.”
The entrepreneur’s journey in the cannabis accessories market began in 2011 when she co-founded DaVinci. Over 15 years, Ludwig helped grow the brand into a respected name in the accessories game.
After years of upside, including expansion into global markets, Ludwig and her partners decided to sell to Greenlane in 2021 with the hope that the brand would “really blossom into what it could be,” she said.
The move was expected to hurl DaVinci to new heights by leveraging Greenlane’s resources and market position after a decade of growth.
However, Greenlane “tried to do too much too fast,” Ludwig said. “We started to wonder if maybe we just didn’t have the horsepower that we needed to get to this $200 million company.”
Things quickly unraveled. Right after the acquisition, “there was this perfect storm where it started to go wrong,” she said. Operational failures, including a botched ERP system implementation, coupled with Greenlane’s ambitious “too-big-to-fail” expansion plans, led to a near-collapse of both DaVinci and Eyce.
“Customer service fell apart, global inventory fell apart,” Ludwig recalled. The Eyce brand went nearly a year without inventory purchases, losing valuable shelf space in the process.
Faced with mounting issues, Ludwig and her partners decided to buy the brands in May 2023. Now, as CEO of Synergy Innovation, Ludwig is focused on rebuilding trust and revitalizing the product lines.
The company already launched a new product, IQ3, under the DaVinci brand. Ludwig is also exploring expansion into the concentrate market and considering ways to diversify Eyce’s brand offerings. She also revealed that Synergy Innovation is already working on two deals to add even more products to its portfolio.
While the brands are now well on the road to recovery, the path hasn’t been exactly smooth. In the first month after regaining control, the company had to address a backlog of customer service issues, including the replacement of more than 700 outstanding warranty claims.
Ludwig said she personally reached out to dozens of customers, reassuring them that “the founders are back at the wheel.”
For Ludwig, the lessons have been about resilience and adaptability.
“I guess if I was going to change things, I would structure the deal differently,” she said. “We would have taken as much stock because after, what now, four reverse splits, that’s not worth anything.”
She said she’s focused on steady growth and maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit that helped her build DaVinci in the first place.
The CEO aims to create a “house of brands” in the cannabis accessories space, leveraging her team’s expertise in product design and innovation. To that end, the company is keenly focused on hardware manufacturing rather than expanding into cannabis or hemp products.
“We’re getting out the gate strong,” Ludwig said.
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The post Cannabis accessory entrepreneur catches second wind after buying back brand appeared first on Green Market Report.”}]] Read More