CASE STUDY
Walk into most dispensaries and the first thing you see is a number: THC percent, treated as a stand-in for quality. It is a poor one.
Two strains at the same percentage can feel, and smell, nothing alike, and the number tells a customer almost nothing about what they will actually enjoy. Mello built its brand on a better idea: that the cannabis that smells best to you is the cannabis that is best for you.
The task at MJBizCon, the industry's largest gathering, was to take that idea off the packaging and prove it on the floor, in front of buyers, operators, and skeptics.
The Idea
If the argument is about smell, the booth had to be about smell. Mello reframed cannabis selection around six aroma profiles: Purple, Cheese, Dessert, Pine, Fruit, and Gas, a shared language simple enough to learn in one breath.
The booth turned that system into something you did, not something you read: a lineup of sealed aromas to sample, a set of cards to flip, and a clear payoff at the end. Smell what you like, and the booth tells you who you are.
The Work
Glen Hawkins designed and managed the Mello booth at MJBizCon 2023, from the sky-and-cloud environment and messaging to the activation at its center.
The activation ran on the nose. Attendees smelled a row of terpene aromas, jars of scent with the answer hidden, then flipped the matching card to reveal which of the six profiles they had gravitated toward. The reveal did the teaching: in a few seconds a stranger understood the whole Mello system, and learned something true about their own taste.
To carry the concept past the table, Glen wrote, architected, and designed Aroma Quest, an app that walks a user through a short question tree to their best-fit aroma profile and points them to specific strains they are likely to love, tied to real store inventory. He built it alongside legal counsel and compliance, so the tool could live inside cannabis regulations and protect the underlying idea.
The booth also worked as a live research lab. Every attendee who ran the activation and the app was a test: Glen gathered their feedback to validate that the app worked and, bigger than that, to pressure-test the six-profile concept itself and earn buy-in from the industry community it would need to catch on.
The Results
MJBizCon put Mello in a room full of the exact people whose buy-in the aroma-profile system needed, and sent them home having felt it work. The booth turned an abstract brand claim into hands-on proof, validated the concept with the industry, and framed Mello as a brand trying to fix how cannabis is chosen, not just sell more of it.
