Cal State Fullerton Alum Brandine Strand is Mastering Marijuana
Brandine Strand’s experience, strong work ethic, and feminine perspective make her a powerful leader in the industry she believes is about to explode.
She was struggling to pay tuition when a pot dealer friend passed on a few of his less lucrative customers and became her supplier. Her customers told her she wasn’t the typical dealer because she was so organized and ran her business professionally. Strand’s father and grandfather worked in sales, and she has always been comfortable as an entrepreneur.
The only female dealer in student housing, Strand believed she was often a target. “It was like the wild west. My place was broken into twice, but I couldn’t call the cops. Even some friends robbed me. But I had to keep going, because I couldn’t have afforded to finish college if I hadn’t been dealing.”
Today, she’s still a player in the cannabis industry—but she no longer has to worry about campus police, dorm supervisors, or pot poachers. Strand is founder and president of Master Minded Distribution, a Santa Ana-based firm that sells cannabis paraphernalia ranging from marijuana grinders and rolling trays to cannabis oil vaporizers, stash jars, and silicone pipes. Master Minded is a multimillion-dollar operation, and sales have doubled every year since its founding in 2011. Now that voters in California and other states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana for those 21 and older, Strand believes that in coming years, there will be more selling opportunity, particularly for women.
It seems fitting that a business that sells the seedless bud of a female plant (sinsemilla) with a female nickname—Mary Jane—is welcoming female entrepreneurs. Nationwide, women make up about 27 percent of executives in the legal-marijuana industry and more than 40 percent of ancillary service firms, including marketing agencies or cannabis paraphernalia companies such as Strand’s, a rate that is far higher than U.S. businesses as a whole, according to a 2017 Marijuana Business Daily survey. A Newsweek cover announced: “Legal marijuana could be the first billion-dollar industry not dominated by men.”
Strand is one of the most prominent Orange County women in the industry. “This is a new, emerging business, so there are fewer barriers of entry for women,” she says. “Still, it’s cutthroat, and as a woman, you have to prove that you’re willing to work very, very hard and run your business like a professional.”
In some traditional businesses, she believes, male executives are autocratic and care more about the bottom line than about their employees. Some female cannabis executives have a different approach. “I want to be their coach, not their boss,” says Strand about her six full-time employees and another half-dozen independent contractors. “I don’t like to say, ‘Do this.’ Instead I try to say, ‘This is why we need to do this.’ We are very team focused here. I try to emphasize that these are not my goals, but our goals.”
A number of female entrepreneurs were introduced to the cannabis industry when medical marijuana was first made available, says Cassandra Farrington, founder and CEO of Marijuana Business Daily. Some were seeking treatment for fibromyalgia, or for a sick parent, or a child with a seizure disorder. As more states legalized cannabis, many women saw business opportunities.
“Women in mainstream businesses often hit that glass ceiling, but the cannabis industry is attractive to them because it doesn’t have an established corporate hierarchy,” Farrington says. “It tends to be more progressive, so there’s more openness for diversity of all kinds. Also, these businesses realized that if they weren’t creating a culture that respected a female point of view, they were going to miss out on a lot of business opportunities.”
Strand followed a meandering path on her way to Master Minded. After graduating in 2005 with a degree in business marketing and communications advertising, she abandoned dealing. She obtained her real estate license and began working for Century 21 Beachside in Huntington Beach, where she was named the company’s rookie of the year. The plaque Strand received is displayed in Master Minded’s conference room. The lessons she learned selling real estate—persistence, resilience, and the ability to hustle—proved applicable later. The Orange County real estate market cratered during the Great Recession, and she got burned out trying to sell houses in such an onerous environment.
Along with three male partners, she decided to open a medical marijuana dispensary. Strand, who says she always approaches business opportunities methodically, visited about 200 dispensaries throughout the state on research trips. “A lot of these places were run-down, almost like pop-up businesses, in parking lots or next to liquor stores. These were not the kind of places where females or patients with health problems would feel comfortable. We wanted a different kind of place. We were four college-educated business people, and we wanted to prove we could run a dispensary in a businesslike manner.”
In 2010 they opened their dispensary in Westminster, but the city council was never happy about the business. After a year, city officials pressured the landlord into refusing to renew their lease, Strand says. This was the nadir of her business career.
In debt and depressed, she moved to Newport Beach and worked as a bartender. Six months later, a college friend started a business selling one of the first cannabis oil vaporizer pens and asked her to handle sales and marketing. The product “blew up,” she says, and medical marijuana dispensaries around the state and smoke shops across the country clamored for the pen. Strand soon saw there was a great business opportunity to sell not just vaporizers, but an array of paraphernalia.
Master minded is based in a 5,500- square-foot office and warehouse in a generic industrial park off a busy Harbor Boulevard thoroughfare. The faint redolence of lemongrass incense wafts through the place, and the walls are covered with inspirational messages such as: Good vibes only, Think big, and Ideas are worthless without execution.
“Being female can have its advantages,” says Strand, dressed in gray jeans, black leather boots, and a black top. On her right forearm is a tattoo of four small birds with the word freedom. “Sometimes we can bring an aesthetic sense, a creative aspect, to our products that the traditional male businessman neglects.”
Hard-shell cases—made to carry and protect pipes, bongs, and other glass smoking accessories—traditionally came in colors such as black and gray. Master Minded pioneered a rainbow of T Case colors, including pink, purple, teal, and chartreuse. The grinders are equally colorful, featuring several sizes in gold, green, purple, and more. Instead of generic bamboo or metal rolling trays, Strand’s team has designed colorful peacock, jelly bean, tie-dyed, and Buddha patterns.
Two years ago, Strand founded another company called Be Lit, which she describes as a “cannabis lifestyle brand.” Be Lit features candles named after marijuana strains, such as Trainwreck, Skywalker, and Maui Wowie; T-shirts with slogans such as Wake/Bake/Meditate and Too Lit to Quit; Himalayan salt lamps, which provide a soft amber glow; and lighters and tote bags with the Be Lit insignia. She has contracted with rapper The Game to endorse Be Lit products, some of which are sold on Amazon, at concerts, and on Master Minded’s website.
After another typical 12-hour workday, Strand enjoys the relaxing properties of cannabis, but while people might expect her to use one of her high-tech vaporizers, she finds the old-school ritual of rolling a blunt soothing. She lounges on the patio of her Costa Mesa home she shares with her three dogs, takes a few hits, and decompresses. She tends to smoke at home when she’s trying to do something creative, such as devising a marketing strategy. Neither Strand nor her employees smoke at work. “If someone came up to me, though, and said that they’re really, really stressed, I’d say it’s OK to go out back and smoke a bowl.”
Five years after Strand founded the company, Californians—including the majority of Orange County voters—passed Proposition 64 in November 2016, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana. The law went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, but there are opponents. To them, Strand points out that many of her customers use cannabis for medical purposes, including Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, arthritis, and the effects of chemotherapy. Those who use it recreationally, she says, are less violent and dangerous than drinkers.
The vast majority of Master Minded’s customers are smoke shops, but Strand hopes to expand in the future to marijuana dispensaries in states where recreational cannabis is legal. While she does not sell products made from cannabis, she plans to move into the marijuana market if it becomes legalized nationwide.
“I was able to come in and become a force in a new and evolving business. And when cannabis becomes federally legal, this company will change and we’ll pursue edibles, tinctures, and other cannabis products. Some people in this industry were drug dealers but don’t have a lot of education and sales experience. That’s where I have an advantage.”
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