Every Monday morning I open my laptop and ask myself the same five questions.
Did anyone order?
Did anyone pay?
What's making buyers choose us over the competition?
Are our products actually better — or do we just think they are?
Do we have enough marketing in the right places?
Five questions. And for most of the week I'm chasing answers across five different tools, a dozen spreadsheets, and a group chat with my reps — just to get a clear picture of where we stand.
That's the reality of running a cannabis brand in Michigan right now. The market is growing. The competition is stacking up. And the operators who survive the next three years won't necessarily be the ones with the best product. They'll be the ones who have answers to those five questions faster than everyone else.
That's why I started Trellis.
MICHIGAN MARKET PULSE — APRIL 2026
There are 832 active licensed retail locations in Michigan as of today. That number is up — and so is the pressure on every brand fighting for shelf space inside them.
Michigan consumers are paying up to 24% in combined taxes at the register. Every purchase is a deliberate choice. Consumers aren't impulse buying — they're choosing. Which means if your brand isn't top of mind at the exact moment a budtender makes a recommendation, you're losing sales you don't even know you're losing.
The dispensaries thriving right now are reordering every 7–10 days. The ones struggling are going 60, 90, sometimes 120 days between orders. The gap is widening — and most brands have no real system to know which side of that gap their accounts are on until it's too late.
The brands winning right now have three things in common. They know exactly which accounts are hot and which are going cold. Their reps are accountable — every visit logged, every vendor day tracked. And they know which products are actually moving versus which ones are just taking up space.
DID ANYONE ORDER THIS WEEK?
This is the question. Everything else flows from here.
If you can't answer it in 30 seconds on a Monday morning — you have an operations problem, not a sales problem. The sale already happened or it didn't. What you need is visibility.
Most brands I talk to are pulling a Distru report, cross-referencing a Sparkplug export, texting their reps, and checking a Google Sheet — just to answer one question. That's 45 minutes of work that should take 10 seconds.
WHAT ACTUALLY MAKES BUYERS CHOOSE YOUR BRAND
This one keeps operators up at night. And the honest answer is — it's rarely just the product.
It's the budtender who loves you. The display that catches someone's eye. The rep who showed up last Tuesday and told a good story. The brand that texted the buyer on a Thursday to check in.
The brands losing shelf space right now aren't losing because their product is bad. They're losing because someone else showed up more consistently, spent smarter, and built a relationship at the store level that you didn't even know was happening.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING
Trellis is a control center for cannabis brand operators. One place to see every account, every order, every rep, every marketing dollar — and answer those five Monday morning questions in under a minute.
We're onboarding a small group of Michigan operators right now to shape the product before we open it up. Founding members get locked-in pricing forever.
If this hits close to home — reply to this email. Tell me which of those five questions is hardest for you to answer right now. That's what we're building next.
ONE QUESTION FOR YOU
Which of these keeps you up most at night?
Did anyone order? Did anyone pay? Are our products actually better? Are we marketing in the right places?
Hit reply. One word is enough.
— Martin
Founder, Trellis