Marijuana Merchant Feature: Mary Mart

Mary Mart is high on education, knowledge and giving back to the community

by Tami Jackson

Mary Mart founder and owner, Damien McDivitt, was an airline pilot for 15 years. That is until he saw the original legislation for recreational marijuana just become legal in the state of Washington.

Mary Mart Founder/Owner Damien McDivitt

"I thought it was an amazing thing to jump in at the end of prohibition for any product," he said. "It was exciting. I had tried small business ventures in the past and this one seemed like it had real good legs so I jumped in and bought some of the lottery tickets right off the bat for different areas in the state."

McDivitt was thrilled to win authorization to open a store here in Tacoma, when he has been living in this city for a long time.

In 2014, Mary Mart opened its doors with 800 square feet of sales floor space, across the street from where it sits now. It was right after the very first Tacoma dispensary, Rainier On Pine, opened its doors. Yet three years later, Mary Mart has grown by heaps and pounds and now has 4,000 square feet of space for its sales floor. 

"We started out with one little register and one flower. Zenix was our first thing ever and we had it in grams and eighths and were out there trying to tell people that we were a marijuana store," said McDivitt.

"The marijuana dispensary business started out with just basically the cannabis flower. Then you saw concentrates come on line and then edibles and maybe it was just a cookie and it was a small shop type of atmosphere," McDivitt said. "Then, suddenly, as the months and year came on, you saw larger branded companies come on like DB3 with the Zoots brand for products and Virgula with edible candies."

According to McDivitt, if you stepped into an early pot shop right off the bat in 2014 you'd have seen products marketed in really simple Mylar bags with a stamp on it that included a number and all the legal terminology. Now when you come into these stores you're seeing branded products that are well beyond anything someone sees even in a convenience store.  "Just the beauty of the branding and marketing that's available in cannabis dispensaries today is amazing," he said. 

"The work these marketers are doing offers a huge service to the industry," McDivitt said. If you go into Oregon or parts of Colorado you don't see the high end branded beautiful products that you see in Washington. The way they did their marijuana laws in those states is just different than the laws here."

McDivitt said that Oregon's pot shops operate in more a deli-style where their flower is sold by scale weight and bagged at the time of purchase. There's no packaging to build brand recognition or keep the product fresh. Here bags are often sealed with nitrogen to prevent any kind of oxygen degeneration.

With 34 employees at Mary Mart, 70 percent are full time. In the morning, Mary Mart might be running six registers but as the day goes on and the sales floor gets busier, more registers open up. There are also back office staff and employees floating to cover breaks so there might be as many as 12 people working in the store and in the background at any point in time. 

"We're a pretty large employer. We've got a well-rounded group of people working here," McDivitt said. "We've got managers, assistant managers, purchasing agents, marketing agents, shift managers and shipping agents. We've also got  five qualified medical consultants who are licensed by the Department of Health to get people into the medical marijuana registry. They get them their medical card, take the photo, and get them into the data base." 

Then McDivitt said there are other employees who are licensed to sell medical marijuana. They are not qualified to give medical advice but they can check somebody through the Department of Health's medical system to get them properly checked out with their product(s).

Laurie Volpe is part of the Mary Mart medical staff. She said every day presents a learning experience for her. "I have customers who come in every single day who  have a different feeling about their pain. Some of them just want to get the relief, they don't want the high. Some of them want a little high or the euphoria they get from the THC but people my age and up are looking for the relief," she said. "They don't want to smoke it. They want to eat it or they want to rub it on. Some of them want to drink it. They're terrified to smoke it nowadays because the weed is so much different than it was (during their teens) when they remember it."

Volpe said her favorite advice to give anybody is to start small. "If you start high and I have to work your way back the chances of getting them to revisit the product is going to be very small. If they get that feeling they don't like - that out of touch - or not being able to control their thoughts or movements, they don't want to feel that. If they get that way gradually and realize 'I kind of like it here' that's different than them going: 'wait, I don't like this.'

A customer told Volpe that  she'd been on opiates for the last 27 years and wanted to get away from them. Volpe said her advice is always to tell people: "Don't just quit the opiates cold turkey. Taper down." She advises folks to find a cannabis product that works and taper down while using it. After four months the woman returned to tell Volpe that she was opiate free. Her husband was also there and he claimed his wife gets high off the CBD but she stopped him mid-sentence to clarify "I'm not high. I just feel good!" 

Open flow and open feel.

The Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) has so many rules regarding what a customer can smell and touch inside a marijuana dispensary now so Mary Mart is designed uniquely to allow consumers to see as many products on display as possible without actually touching them. 

The paraphernalia section of the store is made mostly from glass. "We still carry a little bit of the metal, wood and stone products for the old school mindset that really traditionally like those type of products, McDivitt said, but for the most part it's glass boransilica. "There's a freedom of expression with using glass, as an art form, which is amazing too," he said. At any given time, Mary Mart might have on display everything from a one-dollar pipe, which is easy to replace if you break it, up to a $1,500 glass boransilica pot pipe, with unique design and personality."

Cannabis Menu Boards  

Menu boards brag of more than 400 strains right now in various flower sizes between bulk and one gram units. That's just all the whole flowers. "We've got six boards of just straight flower. The other boards over here are all our concentrates, so all of our baked products, other disserts. We have too many edible products to even fit on a board so those are all on menu form over here," McDivitt said, "We have one of the largest topical lines in the city and I believe within the state. It's huge. As you can see our whole back wall is basically all edible products and topicals." 

At Mary Mart, the displays directly behind the budtender counters are unique and laid out something like a series of end-caps at a grocery store with colorful packages for edibles hanging from metal hooks in clear sight. Yet between each partitioning wall, customers can see a second wall behind them with shelving. That area looks much like a pharmacy, where all the topicals are on display.

[Photo caption:] green glass pipe: Mary Mart sells a number of collector's item type glass pipes that are worth checking out (photo by Tami Jackson)

[Photo caption:] Misha Jones is a budtender at Mary Mart who said if feels great to be at the forefront of the industry. "I love being that middle person to figure out what each customer needs." he said. 

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