A New Yorker whose grandfather started a large steel company, Adrian Sedlin says the entrepreneur spirit is in his blood. A few years after obtaining an MBA from Harvard, Sedlin moved to Santa Barbara to consult for Bargain Network. After it sold, he held leadership roles at two other companies, Ocenture and Crime Reports.
Then one day he got a call from his brother-in-law, a longtime cannabis grower, who wanted Sedlin to buy him a building. “I asked, ‘Can you show me your financials?’” said Sedlin. The brother-in-law could not, but Sedlin’s interest in the cannabis industry was piqued.
He soon found that no one in the industry looked like him — his fitted paisley dress shirts, square glasses, and shaved head are a stark counterpoint to the typical flannels and beards. So he’s since sought to transform the industry’s “counterculture overtones” — which he sees as a mix of Wu-Tang Clan and Duck Dynasty “with a healthy dose of misogyny mixed in” — by offering luxury-end smokable cannabis flowers that are packaged like something you’d buy in a Louis Vuitton store. Canndescent’s strains are creatively named — Connect, Calm, Cruise, and Create, for example — and come with suggested activity pairings. Take a run, for instance, after smoking the Charge.