Full Contact Sport
From toxifillers.com with love
Dave Morrow’s entrepreneurial journey from champion lacrosse star to cannabis power player is an epic path of unconventional pivots. As the CEO of Lume Cannabis Co., he’s grown the Michigan-based company from $2 million in revenue to nearly $200 million in just four years, making it one of the most successful vertically integrated cannabis enterprises in the US.
His story begins in Michigan, far from the traditional East Coast lacrosse hotbeds. Despite his geographical disadvantage, Morrow became one of the sport’s top players. “I was the first American player that wasn’t from the East Coast to achieve a high level of success,” he says. His rise to lacrosse stardom was memorialized by several impressive achievements at Princeton, including one of only a few players in the history of the sport to be named Player Of The Year as a defenseman. Morrow went on to play seven years on the US national team.
While playing the sport he loved, Morrow identified a need for more robust and lighter lacrosse sticks. In 1992, he developed an innovative titanium shaft that revolutionized lacrosse. This invention laid the foundation for Warrior Sports, which Morrow would “form a dorm room business into a global sports brand.” His experience as an elite athlete lent cred to the Warrior brand, while his background working in his father’s machine shop in Detroit provided crucial manufacturing knowledge, including how to scale manufacturing operations. A dozen years after he founded the company, he sold it to New Balance in 2004. Morrow continued serving as CEO of Warrior until January 2019.
Morrow says his background in lacrosse and building a global sports brand influenced his approach to business. High-level sports instilled resilience and adaptability within him—traits crucial for successfully maneuvering through the ever-changing landscape of the cannabis industry.
He says he had a relationship with cannabis in college and that he smoked joints during his lacrosse days and that it improved his performance. “I really enjoyed cannabis,” Morrow says. “Frankly, I believe it helped me become an elite athlete. Because I wasn’t dehydrated, I wasn’t experiencing a lot of the same effects my peers had from drinking all the time. I took a lot of shit for smoking weed. Princeton athletes typically didn’t do that.”
His move into cannabis came from a persuasive nudge from a trusted friend who was already invested in Michigan’s cannabis industry. “I said, ‘Listen, man, I’ll consider this, but there’ll be some stipulations. It has to be legal; we have to get licensed. I’m not going to do this rogue. Plus, I want it to be adult use; I wasn’t interested in the medical business,’” Morrow says. “I was really interested in the challenge of building a consumer brand. I’m an expert at brand building, product development and product design—I’ve been doing it my whole life. But I don’t know shit about cultivating weed. But I know that no matter what category you’re in, if you make an amazing product, people will come back. If you make shitty products, they won’t come back.”
In 2018, the Wolverine State legalized adult-use cannabis with the passing of the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act. The following year, Morrow founded Lume Cannabis Co., bringing his entrepreneurial expertise and innovative approach to the rapidly growing industry. One of the initial challenges Morrow faced was access to capital. He had to rely heavily on friends, family and his own network to raise the capital needed to get Lume off the ground, as it was challenging to access traditional financing sources.
“The part that was the hardest thing for me to get used to was people saying ‘no’ all the time and not getting access to money,” he says. However, his business acumen came through and he would raise “close to a quarter of a billion dollars” through friends and family. “We never did any sponsored raises, private equity or hedge funds. It was all friends and family.”
Lume specializes in various cannabis products, including flower, cartridges, concentrates, edibles, topicals and CBD. The company’s success and solid foundation in the Midwest have positioned it for potential expansion into other markets, including plans to enter into Florida. Despite facing challenges such as plummeting retail prices in Michigan, Lume has flourished by investing in technology and automation to cut production costs by 50 percent. Today, Loom has 38 retail stores, 300,000 square feet of indoor grow and seven million square feet of outdoor. Lume is projecting to harvest more than 150,000 pounds of cannabis this year.
Morrow explains that the company’s approach involved prioritizing the production of high-quality products at scale, ensuring that they could provide top-shelf offerings as well as competitive pricing for customers, similar to strategies that many other consumer packaged goods companies employ. Morrow stresses scalable manufacturing as crucial for success in the cannabis industry. Drawing from his experience with Warrior Sports, Lume focuses on achieving high unit volume with consistent quality at low cost. He believes that having a repeatable manufacturing process capable of scaling to meet demand is vital for Lume’s long-term growth strategy.
Morrow’s vision for his company is to make cannabis products available to a broad spectrum of consumers, catering “from the casual user to the connoisseur” and providing products at various price points to ensure accessibility while maintaining quality. He says he envisions a bright future for products beyond traditional flower options—particularly emphasizing smokeless alternatives that cater to evolving consumer preferences.
As Lume continues its growth trajectory under Morrow’s leadership, he insists that he remains focused on innovation and scalability within the cannabis sector, focusing on developing “innovative products” that “make people happy.”
“We want to make cannabis accessible, from the connoisseur to the casual user and everyone in between,” Morrow says. “I think being smokeless will be very important in the future. I’m not running down flower but look at the way big tobacco is going with vapes and pouches. With cannabis, we have drinks, we have topicals—I think there’s a big future for cannabis outside of just combustibles.”
A big future is something Dave Morrow has always known a lot about.
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