Pier 36 filled up fast on Friday, Sept. 18, as exhibitors and buyers from across the country came out for Revelry Buyers’ Club, New York’s homegrown cannabis trade show hosted by On The Revel. This year’s edition ran a single day instead of the usual two, drawing a sizeable crowd to Manhattan’s Lower East Side to close deals, make introductions and see what’s new in cannabis.
That mix of commerce and connection set the tone on the floor. Licensed operators said business is on the upswing, and their confidence showed up in two ways. First, they’re winning customers back from the illicit market. The second was less expected. A federal ban on most intoxicating hemp-derived THC products takes effect Dec. 11, after a funding bill signed Sept. 2 pushed the deadline back from Nov. 12. But instead of celebrating a rival’s setback, many operators were extending goodwill to hemp businesses. The two seemed connected: those most secure in their position had the least to prove.
Business Day, Community Feel
Passes sorted the crowd into exhibitors, retail buyers, sponsors and press, and the hall ran warm on a bright, sunny day. Exhibitors and buyers worked the aisles between custom-built booths, some with interactive activations, while a Microbusiness Showcase put some of New York’s smallest licensed operators on the same floor as national names like Cookies, STIIIZY and Wyld.
New York’s Office of Cannabis Management and seed-to-sale tracking company Metrc each hosted booths, and the two teamed up for an afternoon “Ask Me Anything.” Outside, a lineup of DJs played near the food vendors. Upstairs, a networking lounge with a bar overlooked the show floor, where The Plugg TV, a cannabis culture and lifestyle network, conducted live interviews with exhibitors.
The atmosphere is by design. Lulu Tsui, who cofounded On The Revel with Jacobi Holland in 2016 and serves as its chief experience officer, said the company’s name is a play on being “on the level” with everyone, rooted in a push for transparency during the years before legalization. “At its core, we believe that when people are surrounded by good music, good food, good conversation and good weed, they’re more open, connected and willing to do good business together,” Tsui said in a statement to Cannabis Now.
Growing With Confidence
New York legalized adult-use cannabis in 2021, but licensed retail didn’t take off until 2024, once a wave of court challenges cleared. Ask operators and brands how business is going now, and the reason for their optimism is visible at the counter, where more customers are showing up as they move away from unlicensed, untested sellers.
Joseph Irizarri, owner-operator of Oasis Cannabis, a vertically integrated microbusiness in the Buffalo, NY, area, has seen the shift firsthand since opening his dispensary about six months ago. “We see at my dispensary more and more people coming in from the black market, because they want that COA, that comfort of knowing that the product is tested,” Irizarri said, referring to the certificate of analysis that documents a product’s lab results. For operators who went through the licensing process, he says, the moment feels “sort of liberating.”
Stone Swiess, senior field sales manager at PAX Labs, put it more bluntly. “If you’re going there expecting to find quality, it’s a crapshoot,” he said of unlicensed shops.
Room for Everyone
That same momentum is showing up in growth plans, too. Edgar Kleydman, CEO of Kaya Bliss, is expanding from two Brooklyn locations to four within the next 60 days. His stores are built around a spa-like, adult-oriented experience, a concept he believes sets him apart even as bigger players enter the market. “I have enough customers and enough clout at this point to be able to compete.”
The same self-assurance carried over into how operators talked about hemp. When asked about the coming ban, most spoke with a tone closer to camaraderie than rivalry, even though the ban stood to work in their favor.
For Irizarri and Kleydman, the goodwill wasn’t complicated. Irizarri said he holds no “harsh feelings” toward hemp businesses, since every operator is just trying to make a living. “We all have to, at the end of the day, pay our bills.”
Kleydman doesn’t see hemp shoppers as his competition to begin with. “It’s a different market. It’s a different world,” he said.
Kenny Morrison, who started cannabis beverage brand CQ Drinks in 2008, went further than either of them, crediting hemp with doing work the licensed industry couldn’t have done on its own. “The hemp loophole and hemp beverages in particular have done more to normalize THC for mainstream consumers than anything else in the last three years,” he said. He’s glad dispensaries will see a “meaningful uptick” from the ban, but not without acknowledging the debt: “they deserve it, obviously.”
That same generosity showed up again from a brand with nothing directly at stake in the hemp market. Paul Vexler, Jeeter’s New York sales state director, treats staying in his own lane as a discipline. “Jeeter always had the mentality to just keep our eyes looking forward and have tunnel vision into what we’re doing, and try not to react to what other people are doing,” he said. That mindset, he added, is what makes room for other businesses: “There’s meat on the bone for everyone to thrive and win.”
Fernway, an independent cannabis brand based in Massachusetts known for its vapes and pre-rolls, made its peace with hemp differently, not by rooting for it, but by opting out early on. Conor Denehan, the company’s Northeast VP of sales, said Fernway considered entering the hemp market at one point and chose instead to focus on its cannabis business across five states: Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Missouri. The ban, he said, doesn’t feel like vindication so much as a formality: it only makes that decision “a lot easier.”
For nearly a decade, hemp-derived products have undercut licensed dispensaries on price and convenience, operating under a different, looser set of rules than cannabis retailers. That history could have made this moment feel like a reckoning. Instead, what came through in every conversation was warmth or pragmatism—never payback.
The welcome extends to skeptics, too. Community Board 10 voted unanimously in June 2024 to recommend that New York deny Kaya Bliss’s license in Bay Ridge, a Brooklyn neighborhood, and more than 200 people rallied against the application on Third Avenue on June 24, according to The Tablet. Approximately two months after the store opened, Kleydman said one of the protesters came in on behalf of her sister, who has Parkinson’s and had trouble sleeping. She bought a low-THC gummy, which helped, and she returned to apologize to Kleydman for taking part in the protest.
Looking Ahead
Despite the confidence, operators aren’t treating the road ahead as settled. Massachusetts voters will decide on Question 8 on the Nov. 3 ballot, a measure that would end adult-use recreational cannabis sales in the state. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a national anti-legalization group, has put nearly $3.2 million behind the campaign through its political arm, according to campaign finance filings. A repeal there, Denehan said, would embolden similar efforts elsewhere: “If they try to do it there, they’re going to try to go to other markets as well.”
Two dates now stand out on the industry’s calendar: Nov. 3 in Massachusetts and Dec. 11 for the federal hemp ban. Only the first worries the operators who showed up at Revelry. But at Pier 36, neither date overshadowed the energy Tsui said defines these gatherings, one that “comes from everyone in the room wanting to do business together and bringing good energy.” The message operators brought with them was simpler still: There’s room for everyone.
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