The founding buyerBefore theRulebook.

Around New Year’s 2014, somebody took a picture behind the counter at Phytologie Wellness. A young buyer in a snapback grins at the camera while Tyson, the shop’s boxer, leans across the counter beside him. A single jar sits on the counter. In front of it is the price sheet, and across the top someone has typed “HAPPY 2014!!!” An eighth is $55. An ounce is $360.

That buyer is John Hirsch, and by then he had been in cannabis for almost a decade. He is Illinois born and raised. California is where he learned the trade.

In 2008 he crossed to the other side of the counter as an assistant buyer at Harborside in Oakland. From there he bought full time for Cannabis Buyers Club Berkeley from 2010 to 2012, then for Phytologie Wellness from 2012 to 2013.

He had teachers. At Harborside it was Rick Pfrommer, who helped found the dispensary in 2006 and ran its purchasing before moving into education there (his Cannabis Now bio covers the rest). Pfrommer, Hirsch says, taught him how to actually spot good cannabis and how to negotiate. At CBCB his mentor was Deborah Sadler, and under her direction, he says, he became the first buyer in Berkeley to carry wax and shatter. Aundre Speciale, the founder behind both CBCB and Phytologie Wellness, is on the list too.

So is someone who never held a buying title. Hirsch also credits Craig, a budtender at the Love Shack in San Francisco.

“I didn’t learn cannabis purchasing from a textbook or some formal procurement program,” he says. “I learned it by doing it. You put money into inventory, see what customers respond to, see what sits, figure out why, and make the next decision better.”

Over time, he says, the job stopped being about individual products and became about the whole assortment. What’s missing? Where is the menu too heavy? Which price points are covered? Which products are tying up cash?

The relationships were the point. Irie Care was the exclusive retailer for Grandiflora Genetics, the Oakland breeders, until Grandiflora signed with Cookies. In June 2016 the two entered the High Times NorCal Medical Cannabis Cup together at the Cow Palace and placed eighth with Platinum Puff in the indica category. The entry bag still exists: Prop 215 labels filled out by hand, an Irie Care lion sticker on the front.

Concentrates were where Irie Care made its name. It was the official Bay Area distributor for Rumpelstiltskin Extracts, the Santa Cruz brand better known as Rump Wax, and carried some of its first batches: small clear jars with a gnome label, strain names written in marker, shatter folded in parchment. Hirsch later moved his own growing outdoors, and that flower became Irie Care’s house line, which included shatter and later rosin.

Routing software cut average delivery time from 90 minutes to 42. Average order value rose from $65 in 2015 to $112 in 2020 as the menu grew into concentrates, edibles and live resin.

Two Irie Care ads, about two years apart, show what Prop 64 did to the job. The first, from CULTURE Magazine’s April 2016 issue, is a collective talking to patients: Rump Wax, “the cleanest and highest quality concentrates,” a coupon for first-timers.

The second ran on the back cover of the East Bay Express around 4/20 in 2018. The name had changed to Irie Care Delivery, the lion had been redrawn, a temporary state license number sat under the logo, and the deals were on brands customers already knew: STIIIZY and Kingpen, Select, Kushy Punch, buy-one-get-one eighths. Behind the scenes, Hirsch moved the business onto METRC, California’s track-and-trace system, and renegotiated wholesale pricing with growers so the new taxes didn’t all land on customers.

“Before that, California cannabis still felt like a community that happened to be turning into an industry,” he says. “After Prop 64, cannabis became much more structured as a regulated commercial market.”

Irie Care didn’t end on a spreadsheet. It ended after the third break-in.

The building housed three licensed cannabis businesses, and Hirsch says the landlord was trying to push them out rather than help. Each break-in meant damaged property and stolen inventory. The last one came in the middle of the afternoon. Most of his staff had already quit, worried about their safety. The market wasn’t helping either: prices were falling, and the numbers weren’t working. After the third break-in, he decided to sell.

Irie Care’s licenses, fleet and other assets went to a regional delivery company in 2022. Everyone on staff was paid in full, plus a bonus, and the company closed with no regulatory penalties on its record.

“Closing Irie Care taught me that being good at cannabis and building something people care about doesn’t guarantee that the business survives,” Hirsch says. “Every case you bring into a store represents cash. Every product sitting too long represents cash. Every discount you eventually have to take because you bought too deep comes out of somewhere.”

Around late 2023, Hirsch came home to Illinois to run purchasing at Socíale in Park Ridge, a menu of roughly 1,000 SKUs in a state where, as he put it on a Flower Expo panel in March 2025, “we can’t see or touch or smell any of the products that we sell.”

“California taught me to understand cannabis, customers, relationships, quality, and culture,” he says. “Illinois has forced me to get much deeper into assortment structure, inventory investment, margin, velocity, price architecture, compliance, vendor strategy, and what every SKU is actually doing for the menu. When you’re managing hundreds of active products, you can’t just ask whether something is good. You have to ask what role it plays.”

On that same Flower Expo stage, he talked about Illinois’ coming switch to Metrc, the tracking system he had moved Irie Care onto seven years earlier. “I worked with it in California,” he told the room, “and I think it’s a great system.” That summer, Illinois made the switch.

“Because I couldn’t find enough cannabis content written from where I actually sit,” Hirsch says. “There is endless content about brands. But there isn’t nearly enough about what happens on the other side of that conversation. What does the buyer actually see? Why does one product get the shelf and another one doesn’t? Why does a great product sometimes get cut?”

“I want to talk about the products because I still love the products. I want to talk about the people because relationships are still a huge part of this industry. But I also want to talk about the numbers, the decisions, the mistakes, the technology, and what actually happens behind the buying desk.”