Building Jaunty Into One of New York’s Top Cannabis Brands ft. Nicolas Guarino

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Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields. This week we've got a very special guest, Nicolas Guarino, co-founder and CEO of Jaunty. Nick, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today? Nicolas Guarino: Of course, thanks for having me. I am good, I'm excited. It's planning time for 2026 — super busy time, but we also just got done with an even busier time, so my calendar isn't just completely filled up every single day all day. It's nice to be able to think and strategize. Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm excited to pick your brain on some topics, some goals, maybe a little background about Jaunty, and then revisit you throughout the year to see if any of those things take a hard right or hard left, because as you know better than anyone, this industry is fast-paced. Scenario planning is easy to do, but being dynamic in a market like New York with the unknown curveballs that can come at any moment, you have to be ready to rock. For our listeners unfamiliar with you, can you give a quick background on yourself and how you found your way to the cannabis space? Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, for sure. I'm about to turn 30, which is great — I've got two kids. I'm still at the age where I'm excited to turn 30 because with two kids, at 27, 28, people are always like, "oh, you're that age?" and I feel like I'm finally going to be an age that's appropriate with the kids I have, including Jaunty and those "children" too. I was going to Baruch College in New York City, and with a couple of roommates we decided to go fundraising for a CBD company back in 2017. Classic startup scenario — three partners doing 33/33/33, and we all thought everything was going to go well. We went fundraising Shark Tank style, pitched maybe 50 or 60 people, raised about $2 million, sold about 40% of the company, and according to the Excel sheets we were all going to be millionaires within maybe three years tops. It was a super rough ride, honestly. CBD licensing wasn't centralized — states across the country started opening up programs for it, and everybody made the same Excel sheets thinking they'd do 10-20 million in sales with 30% net margins, no 280E, right? I'd also been smoking weed since I was maybe 13 or 14, and pretty consistently after 16 I was like, this smells like weed and gets me closer to weed, so maybe one day this will turn into that. We started operating in 2018 as a hemp company, and I think our big mistakes were being all over the place — we wanted to be white labelers, high-volume extractors, have our own brand, do consulting. We were doing a lot of things, none of them well. Our peak year was 2019, when we did about $3 million in sales, and even that year we lost around $400,000 on the accounting side. We learned a ton of lessons, lost one of our co-founders along the way, and had underestimated how much we needed to raise for the 2018 buildout. I actually took a $900,000 mortgage against my sister's house to finish buying CO2 extraction equipment, telling myself 2019 was going to be the year. Then in 2020, sales dipped again, and there was no way to maintain the structure — we let go of salespeople, tried to convince them to stay commission-only, let go of most of the production floor and just did production ourselves. We kept our farming relationships intact, which later translated into the rec side. I just couldn't give up — I kept thinking if my sister loses her house, my life is over. So during COVID, myself and a couple of partners who stayed were literally living off PPP checks. For us, COVID was almost a blessing — not for the rest of the world, but at least we had a paycheck. We kept extracting. The price of CBD distillate went from about $6,000 per kilo in 2018 to about $60 per kilo later on. In 2021, our extraction equipment company figured out a way to co-inject ethanol into our extractor, which took us from a production cost of about $250-300 per kilo down to about $80 a kilo. That took six to eight months to get working properly. By the time we were selling a lot of it, I called a broker who hadn't wanted to talk to me before, and he said the price was now $65 a kilo. Those were dark times — me, the new people I'd convinced to join, and the investor who had bet on this whole plan all wondering what to do. The investor stopped talking to me for two or three months. Then shout out to Alan Gandelman and the hemp association — I'm blanking on its exact name at the time — but they convinced the state that if New York wanted cannabis legalization as a win that year, the way to do it quickly was to give hemp farmers and processors first dibs at licenses, since they already had the infrastructure to plant, extract, and make finished cannabis products. Governor Cuomo had resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal, Governor Kathy Hochul came in, and the MRTA had been passed for almost two years without even a director of the OCM being appointed. It worked out — and funny enough, neither my investor nor my co-founder Christian really believed me at first. As soon as I saw the news that you needed two years of hemp experience to get into rec cannabis, I told them, "this oil we're selling for $60 a kilo right now is about to be worth $30,000 a kilo." It took two or three weeks of showing them the models before they said, "okay, Nick, if you say so, we'll give it a shot." That announcement came in February 2022. All the smart brands across the country that follow this stuff closely were interested in New York, and we were one of 13 people on the state's list with this license. We got reached out to by a lot of big national brands — California, Oregon, Colorado based — and explored partnerships, visiting their facilities. We were never able to get to a deal that made sense. Our plan was to launch our own house brand but also distribute a few recognized white-label brands alongside it, because we were afraid our own brand wouldn't get traction. We almost did a deal with a Massachusetts brand but backed out, realizing it wasn't helping us the way we needed. By October, November, December, Christian had developed a brand together with Dan Dorbo, our VP of creative, who's written some of the top-selling cannabis strain books. The question was what product category to focus on. I said, none of us know how to grow fire indoor flower or make respectable pre-rolls — that's not our forte. We know extraction. I'd been smoking vapes since the cotton-wick days through ceramics, and I'd made a lot of D8 vapes during that 2020-2021 dark period, so I knew you could take distillate, blend in terpenes — as long as you got good terpenes — and make a solid product. So we launched with vapes. We convinced our investor to help us get a vape filler, which was lower cost than I expected — about $35,000 — and could crank out a thousand vapes an hour. Christian and I were filling them in the back with Connor Brown, our COO, formulating. We didn't have money for inputs, but our farm relationships paid off — we told them we'd pay within 12 months once one single store opened in the state, and they agreed. We thought there was no way only one store would open — surely five, ten, fifteen would open. But Governor Hochul was in a rush to say the program wasn't a failure, so they opened one store on December 31st just so they could say it happened in 2022. I was immediately on the phone with farms on January 1st asking for 30 more days. Our investor came in clutch and funded about three months of paying our input suppliers exactly on schedule, over $100,000 a month, which was tough — but at least we weren't the only ones caught off guard. We ended up being the third vape brand on shelves after Flower Farms and Heirloom. Housing Works' first order was about $98,000, which eliminated all our doubts about needing other brands to white label with us. We said, forget white labeling, forget toll extraction, let's just produce enough to feed this. At the time we also had two other house brands — a tincture brand and a live-product brand called Resinate and Jumbo Dose — and did a white label deal with Critical around late 2023, early 2024. Eventually we consolidated everything into Jaunty because that's clearly what people resonated with — people at events would ask if we were a multi-state operator, when really we just had six SKUs and had only started in New York. We'd failed so many times and come so close to bankruptcy with the CBD business that we were scared straight and didn't want to lose focus again. Bryan Fields: Did people in your life ask you, "Nick, maybe this isn't the right space, maybe it's the wrong timing"? Early on, doing the CBD stuff, you're young, the investor gave you a big check, you're trying everything to survive. Did self-doubt creep in? Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, for sure. I was super lucky that the people close to me — my wife, my dad, my other co-founder, people like Max Freeman — were sort of blindly optimistic, always saying it was going to be okay. Some of the early shareholders, out of about 20-some people who put in that first $2 million, probably would have found it more comfortable to just take a tax write-off and be done with it, but I didn't care what those people thought. I saw them almost as "the others" I needed to defend myself against. I got lucky that the people closest to me kept saying I'd figure it out, that for every hard time there'd be a better one later. Those are the learning elements that stack — getting smashed in the face, getting up, again and again — which is the resilience that helps me now know exactly what not to repeat with Jaunty. Bryan Fields: It's kind of hard to imagine — if we'd told you four or five years ago that you'd go through some really hard stuff for a long time, but in 2026 you'd be sitting in New York with the market fully open and the brand on top of the charts, would you have believed it? Nicolas Guarino: [laughs] No way, I would have never believed it. It's kind of impossible to see. It really wouldn't have been possible without the team — especially Christian, Max, and Connor Brown. I still don't understand how I convinced them to keep pushing as hard as they did, working late nights with no clear end of wealth creation in sight. I was cheerleading a bit, but they were the technical people with the real vision for each department. Bryan Fields: Somebody has to cheerlead, right? Because when New York opens with just one store for Housing Works, it doesn't matter how good your product is — there's no distribution angle. You're at the mercy of what Housing Works alone can do, and if New York continues to move slowly, it just hinders your prospects. You're being pushed down over and over, needing capital to survive while waiting for the state to get its act together, even though cannabinoids were undeniably going to be successful in New York. It's just a matter of whether you have the resiliency, capital, and resources to make it through the chaos to the other side. Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, and on that slow-opening note, there was actually a benefit for our team, because we were able to keep our own distribution. My cousin moved himself here from Florida, away from his family, just to run logistics — he's an incredible logistics guy. We ran models like, "if there were 500 stores, this is where our warehouses would be." If 500 stores had all opened at once, we might have gotten crushed under that pressure too. On the other side, as you said, is the need for capital — our investor was tapped out, and he taught me a lot about talking to the team about growing the old-school way, from your own margin, rather than assuming endless capital. One of the biggest lessons of the past couple years is that I always thought once we hit $500,000 or a million in monthly sales, the capital needs would be over. The sad realization is it never ends — the faster you grow, the more capital you need, which feels paradoxical. Unless your input suppliers are willing to extend credit, you can only grow as much as your margin allows. We did about $6 million in sales in 2023, $15 million in 2024, and just closed out 2025 at $29.4 million — roughly doubling every year — and I'm always wondering why the bank account is empty. The answer is: if you don't want to be in this position, you have to stop growth, but then you basically die. It's mind-blowing that a company like Wyld can be in 26 states, expanding, in Canada, and can acquire another big competitor. You don't appreciate how hard that is until you're facing the barrel of payments and compressing margins. I'm also starting to understand why Michigan does $300 per person in sales despite having the lowest prices in the country — it's not despite the low prices, it's because of them. New York has most of the geography covered, with the exception of Long Island, and this is supposed to be a $4-5 billion market, but it's eking out $1.8 billion in 2025. Consumers will consume more weed when it's cheaper. Bryan Fields: I can say from my own perspective here in New York, education is a major factor. I still run into people on Long Island who have no idea cannabis is legal, and when they do go into dispensaries, they're shocked by the price. That's problematic — we opened in 2022, we're sitting here in 2026, we did a billion and a half when we should be doing six. If I were New York, I'd want that tax revenue and ask whether we've set the market up for success. I don't think anyone would argue yes. They're doing better than they did, but that's like going from Dante's ninth inferno to the seventh — congratulations, you're in second-to-last place now. Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, and I think it starts with education. At Hall of Flowers at the end of last year, I saw a lot of California brands excited to come to New York, targeting early 2026. I wonder if that helps accelerate consumers who know those California brands but are unfamiliar with the New York ones, versus just buying from their dealer. Once prices become more competitive, it's a no-brainer. More people are venturing into dispensaries and getting more comfortable, but it takes time to shed that unknown aspect. Bryan Fields: New York hasn't done brands like yours any favors by making it so difficult to find dispensaries and by not educating consumers well. That's hindered brands from being immediately successful given all the other challenges. Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, for sure. On the positive side, every year the products get a lot more exciting — the concentrates I'm seeing are on par with anything else in the country. Education, pricing coming down, and product quality going up is what's going to help the market reach that $4-5 billion target. But the Michigan thing is mind-blowing — pre-rolls are a dollar there, vapes are ten dollars, and consumers spend a lot more. Bryan Fields: Why do you think prices are so low there? Nicolas Guarino: I think it's really just supply and demand. There's a ton of supply, people are super competitive, and only the most efficient producers come out on top with a margin at those prices. There will always be room for a small-batch craft player like 710 Labs, who has to charge what they charge because of scale, but the bottom line is supply-side economics. Bryan Fields: Right, it's expensive here to spin up operations, and it's taken a long time, so there's limited supply, and limited supply means people pay more to command demand. The market hasn't found its equilibrium yet. I wonder if eventually there are interstate compacts, three-state packs, where it makes sense to bring in supply because New York doesn't necessarily need to grow all its own cannabis, just like we don't grow oranges in all 50 states. Nicolas Guarino: In my opinion, the only defense against that kind of interstate competition is having a brand that people trust that's consistent, because otherwise you're in that $65-a-kilo game that's only for behemoths of production — companies that exist even in California on the white-label side, like NUG, with hundred-million-dollar-plus plants. For any small or medium player, you're not going to compete with that. The only competition is establishing a name where you can purchase inputs from wherever they come from and still squeeze out a margin because you've delivered a consistent product that consumers trust under a label. Bryan Fields: How maniacal are you about consistency? You've mentioned it a few times, and you've talked about the importance of brand. Nicolas Guarino: A lot. It's basically all that my co-founder Christian and Connor Brown worry about. It starts with the product — every Jaunty Sour Diesel 510 cartridge is the same. We don't change hardware to a cheaper price from CCELL or whoever, and we don't change terpenes even if we taste a batch that's fire, because this is the Jaunty Sour Diesel that's won in New York — until it starts to fall off, we won't mess with it. Then there's service to the stores — we do 24-hour delivery to about 75% of the state as of this Monday, now that we finally got our third warehouse open in Buffalo. If a store orders by 3 p.m., we show up the next morning, and that's how they talk to their budtenders about Jaunty — consistent, reliable. Then there's how we show up physically in the store — our display assets, planograms. We're developing planograms based on six store archetypes so stores know exactly what display pieces they need and how to show up. Consistency spans backend service, what consumers see, digital displays, menus — we email stores repeatedly to update outdated images, and our director of marketing audits everything online every month. I think that's why I buy a brand for anything, clothing or otherwise — I've seen the thing show up the same way a thousand times, so I trust the quality regardless of price. Sometimes you get disappointed still, when something's outsourced and the product sucks, and you never buy it again. That's the difficult part of our space — people are trying a product for the first time, and it either becomes a repeat buy or you never buy it again, and consistency is probably the most important reason why. I keep coming back to the Coca-Cola analogy: if you had a Coke in New York and then a Coke in Baltimore that tasted different, you'd lose trust completely, even if it was just one bad batch. Bryan Fields: That's where I think the next iterative level of brands comes from — the ones maniacal about consistency, because if you're spending $60-80 on a product and it's amazing once but different the next time, you don't want to risk $80 again — you might try a competitor you know delivers consistently. Nicolas Guarino: Exactly. One thing I used to fight with Christian about was taking Reddit reviews seriously — I'd say it's just Reddit, but now I respect that he takes them seriously, because even one guy posting that a batch didn't taste good means you're losing that customer. We can try to make it right with a promo code, but usually that doesn't work — instead we go back through the processes, and our compliance guy is great at tracing it back to the batch. I've heard people say not to even look at Reddit because it could be competitors trolling, but most of the time it's not, and you can tell by how people write. It's harder still with the concentrate category — you start with a plant as raw material, run it through an extraction system with a lot of variable parameters, and you want the end product to be the same every time, balancing standardization with artistry. Bryan Fields: Plus every year's harvest can be different. Nicolas Guarino: Exactly, and it really starts at the genetics. For live products, we were lucky to hire someone out of 710 Labs who was their national director of R&D — he can smell a jar of oil and identify the strain instantly. He's maniacal about how things are kept cold throughout the chain, but he can only do so much if the genetics aren't stable. Everyone wants to cross new strains every year, but seeds aren't stabilized, so if you plant straight seeds you get eight different phenotypes in a field. That forces you to take clones from a selected phenotype, but if you don't have a mother house keeping that plant year over year, you'll never have consistent live products. This year we're setting up our own cloning operation, because there's no other way around it. You also need traceability throughout the process, logged digitally, because if the one expert running processing gets sick and someone else runs a batch differently, that batch is ruined, and you end up back on Reddit wondering what went wrong. I understand why some brands build around distillate or liquid diamonds instead — fewer variables. Then it becomes about whether your terpene house is consistent — the top ones, like True Terpenes and Eybna, are fairly consistent, I don't know exactly how they do it. I visited True Terpenes' headquarters and it was really impressive — they have a ton of PhDs doing real science. Bryan Fields: That level of investment is where I think it's harder to stand out, but when the shakeout comes and there are fewer brands on shelves, the ones that survive will be consistent, repeatable, and differentiated — a hard trifecta. That's probably why a lot of California brands are coming to New York now — they've already hammered out that process elsewhere. Nicolas Guarino: Yeah, and that's tricky, especially when those brands choose to work with a local processor — I haven't seen a successful relationship there yet. I'm almost happy we didn't do any of those early white-label deals, because unless you fully dedicate yourself to white label, which I respect, you can't nurture your own brand while producing, distributing, and collecting for others — you'll never prioritize it the same way. A lot of the brands that came in early through those relationships have since left them and bought their own licenses, like Jetty, who I've been really impressed with — their solventless products here are top tier, and they had to navigate a lot of failure to build the tools for visibility and precision that let them get there. Bryan Fields: Is your day-to-day more about putting out current fires and collections, or about orienting the business for the next six to twelve months? Nicolas Guarino: The latter, for sure, over the past three to six months. The team we have, plus new additions, has really made it so that when I hear about a fire, it's genuinely rare — I might need to call someone to apologize, but that's about it. It's an adjustment for me honestly, after almost eight years of just being in the fire — I sometimes want to go back to the comfort zone of visiting the manufacturing facility, but the team tells me they don't need me there, they need me figuring out how we exist over the next three to five years. I was just working on my 2026 vision statement — thank God for ChatGPT, I don't know how people did business before this. I ask it to pose questions as though it were an angry board member who didn't understand any of this, and answering those questions helps me think it through. My conclusion is you can throw out dream scenarios for two, three, five years, but you really have to focus on the one-year plan, because as hemp people learned in November, everything can suddenly change. My one-year statement for 2026 is about leveraging the brand trust and team we've built to start building cash. Even though we were profitable in 2025, all of it was reinvested — some of that was necessary debt repayment, over a million dollars in principal, which I'm proud of, but a lot was incohesive spending by different departments without thinking holistically about margin. Our net margin in 2025 ended up around 14%, and the question for 2026 is how we work together monthly, reviewing budgets versus actual spend and reducing or increasing it deliberately, especially since we need to elevate Jaunty's live products while building cash at the same time — we can't keep living off a one-week cash reserve. Bryan Fields: Do you think there could be hidden expenses somewhere in operations, or costs not properly visible or bucketed correctly? Nicolas Guarino: Somewhat, yeah, but fundamentally more of it is that we overcontracted material and now it's sitting in inventory. This year is about keeping finished product inventory at 30 days and non-cannabis input inventory at 30 days too, which is hard when shipping from China takes 90 days and you're guessing at demand. We had four or five months of inventory sitting around at one point; I think we can get that down to 30-45 days. On the cannabis input side, we just started a wholesale program we'd resisted for years — we assigned an experienced sales rep from California to manage it and clear out freezers of material that's not moving, even at a loss, because it's going to spoil anyway. And then there's spend on the operations and marketing side that quietly creeps — sampling, free batteries, butane usage in extraction. We're working on putting IoT devices throughout the operation to reduce human input error, but inventory is going to be the biggest focus in 2026. Bryan Fields: There are so many moving variables, and the train is moving fast — you can't stop to analyze every micro decision, but you also need production batches ready and inventory on hand, all while managing cash and keeping investors happy about growth. Nicolas Guarino: It's a really difficult balance. We spent about $250,000 on inputs for our butane line back in November 2024, on a consultant's advice that the machine would be running by January — we walked past those boxes in the warehouse for over 12 months, and we only actually launched those products last month, in December 2025. You can have those multi-hundred-thousand-dollar mistakes, but you have to learn from them. Bryan Fields: If you could go back, what would you have done differently? Nicolas Guarino: I'd get the machine running first, then prove the inputs could make the quality of oil we wanted before ordering everything — no one's going to die if we wait two months to fill the vapes, and we could use that time to build market excitement instead. This industry is written on fire, everyone wants to make an absolute fire product immediately, and the last thing I want is my sales team yelling at me — but if they're yelling because product they've already sold is coming, that's a much better problem to have. Bryan Fields: What is needed for New York to go from $1.5 billion to $6 billion over the next 12 months? Nicolas Guarino: Quite a few things. Stores still need to open — Long Island alone is probably a billion of that six billion, and it's only got 11 stores. I also looked at the OCM's annual report — enforcement actions against illicit shops went from around 800 in 2024 to about 120, and that's with three or four thousand illegal storefronts still out there selling bootleg product. That has to come to an end, the same way illegal gambling shrank once legal casinos took over most of the market. Consumers need to know New York has legal stores, that employers can't drug test and fire them for cannabis use here — that was great legislation. And prices do need to come down for people buying from bodegas or their dealer, since they're getting top California material at half the price or less right now. Bryan Fields: Does that last point push you to prepare the team for consolidation, even while you're trying to strengthen your cash position? Nicolas Guarino: Yes. We've been paying remarkably high prices for dry biomass for distillate for a long time — I go to our farms and see new tractors, new cars, they're making money — so there's room for us to lower input costs, and that'll be one of our first steps preparing for the inevitable compression. We've automated a lot of the facility already. We're taking a trip to China in March, myself and two other co-founders plus our chief revenue officer, for two weeks to understand where our non-cannabis inputs come from, what the factories are like, and the potential to shave 25-40% off pricing by cutting out brokers in the middle. We need to attack both cannabis and non-cannabis input costs, and also make products people are willing to pay mid-to-upper tier for — we're never going to hit Michigan's $10-vape pricing, and we won't sell shitty distillate or shitty live resin just to hit a low price point, but we do need to find more margin, because pricing is definitely going below $40, probably another 25% compression down to around $30. Bryan Fields: Last question — what question do you wish more people asked you? Nicolas Guarino: I guess, thinking about my team and suppliers, I wish it was more like "Nick, how do we avoid overspending?" instead of "I know you said we overspend, but here are four more initiatives." Bryan Fields: [laughs] "I saved you eight grand." Nicolas Guarino: [laughs] Exactly. Bryan Fields: Nick, for our listeners who want to buy Jaunty products, where can they find you? Nicolas Guarino: We're in about 430-440 stores in the state. If you go on the Jaunty website, we've got a new merch store, which is exciting, and you can find where to buy us there too — put in your zip code and it'll pop up all the locations that actively have us in stock. That's the easiest way, because if I start calling out specific dispensaries, I'll get in trouble with the others. Bryan Fields: Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Nicolas Guarino: Thanks so much, Bryan.