Voices of Tomorrow is a recurring feature highlighting PoC who are reshaping the retail industry.
As Covid lockdowns went into effect around the world in 2020, Joanne Wilson, a seasoned angel investor with more than 140 companies in her investment portfolio, found herself burned out and bored.
It was right around then that the push to legalize recreational cannabis in New York was getting hot, and it intrigued Wilson. That was more or less the beginning of New York’s premier cannabis dispensary and lifestyle store, Gotham, which is set to open three more stores in NYC over the next couple of months.
The company is particularly dedicated to supporting marginalized communities through its partnerships with nonprofits like Strive, which will directly serve Black and other communities of color disproportionately affected by systemically oppressive cannabis laws.
Wilson opened up to Retail Brew about her work with Gotham, and the challenges that still exist for PoC in retail and entrepreneurship.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What makes Gotham unique?
One of the things that sets us apart is we are a premier brand with a very different experience when you walk in that door. It is not about just executing on that purchase, but also in terms of the kind of company that is very important to me to build. We pay people 25 bucks an hour. We also give you four weeks of vacation. We pay for your healthcare. You don’t have to buy into it if you’re full time. When we grow as a company and there are jobs that are available, the first place we post is internally, so there’s opportunity to move up. There’s also a pool of profit, profits that [go] back to the employees, and we’ll continue at each store individually, so that you know many of these employees have the ability to make life-changing money for themselves and their families. We also are starting a monthly curriculum to help our employees think about how they put their money into banks or they put it into bonds, or how they should be thinking about their finances, and then teaching them about marketing, or teaching about buying Google AdWords—just things that they don’t understand what maybe we’re doing at the executive level, but to allow them to understand that. Because if you don’t see it, you can’t be it.
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What kind of challenges still exist for PoC and WoC in retail?
I think there will be challenges for PoC and women for a long, long, long time. I think that the more women and PoC who have success, and turn back around to pull up the others behind them to help them succeed…it will become just normal. And certainly, if Kamala [Harris] becomes president, which I fully believe that she will be, I hope that through her success, we will see changes and young people saying, “Well, I can be it, if she can be it.” And now it’s there. For so long in our country, we have done nothing but bad things to groups of people to keep them down, even if you think about and you look through pictures of Black communities during the ’50s or ’60s or ’70s, they were living the same life as the white communities, but they weren’t in the media. They weren’t in magazines. It was almost like they were behind closed doors. And that needs to stop.
What kind of changes would you like to see from the executive level?
It is important for anyone to make an effort to be diverse. For instance, there have been CEOs and founders who have said, “Listen, I’m having a really hard time finding a woman for this job.” I was like, “Well, guess what? If you only interview women, it won’t be that hard, right? Or if you’re like, “You know what, we are not looking diverse enough. Whoever we hire next, better be someone of color. If it takes us twice as long, so be it.”
That’s one of the things that’s the beauty of Gotham, because it is such a unique space, and it’s not just retail; it’s cannabis and retail. So we are such a cast of characters that all come from such different walks of life. The reality is that is what’s going to make that successful because everyone comes from somewhere else.