 I've had to become sort of an expert on what is a cannabinoid and how do you derive them. But before that, you know, I was a history major. I didn't study science. And so as I'm reading about like what makes CBD CBD and why is it different from THC, my whole thought process was how can I distill this down to sort of the most basic information while still treating our consumers like they're smart. And that was always really important to me. That's actually part of the reason why we called the company Sage Leads. This idea of the Sage, which stands for wisdom and discovery and healing and knowledge. This is Starved to Storefront, the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is Kerrigan Barrens, founder of the CBD skincare brand, Sage Leads Naturalist. Kerrigan and her co-founder Kaylee had used CBD products and experienced first-hand relief from the immense anti-inflammatory benefits that it offers. They wanted to bring this to the wider consumer market, but even though there's no THC in their products, the U.S. government doesn't distinguish between the two. And when it comes to the U.S. consumers, they're also largely still learning to distinguish between CBD and THC products as well. Kerrigan and Kaylee knew the challenges and still dove ahead first into their new company. In many ways, they're still educating the market and working within the narrow confines of the law. But in the six years since they started Sage Leads Naturalist, they've already shown how effective CBD is in soothing pain and have grabbed a sizable share of a rapidly growing market. So listen in, let's recover everything from overcoming the stigma around hemp-derived products, why banks are the biggest obstacle currently facing the CBD market, and what led her to sell the company she had built from the ground up. Now, back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Kerrigan from Sage Leads Naturalist. Thanks for joining. Thank you for having me. For everyone who doesn't know, tell us what Sage Leads Naturalist is. Sage Leads Naturalist is a wellness brand. We started in 2015 when fewer than 2% of Americans had heard of CBD, and I had a life-changing experience. Using CBD knew that it was going to change people's lives for the better. Started a consumer brand, so mostly topical products, some supplements with CBD, but knowing that ultimately the goal was to just help people feel better and use natural plant-based ingredients doing that. So we now consider ourselves more of a natural company than a CBD company, but most of our products do still contain CBD. So early days, so I want to ask you, how did you first even get CBD? How did it become on your radar? What was your first experience with it? Yeah, I had a friend when I was living in San Francisco, probably in 2012, who had to stop drinking, and she was dealing with some chronic health issues, and she was trying to figure out, like, how do I still have a good time? So she started exploring cannabis, and it's cannabinoids, and she told me, like, CBD is something that makes me feel better. And it planted this idea in my mind. At that time, I didn't have a cannabis prescription. I wasn't spending time with dispensaries, so I didn't have access to it, but I was curious about it. And then two years later, I saw it on someone's kitchen counter when I was at their house. It was just a jar of honey that was infused with CBD, and I asked if I could try some. So I put some into a cup of hot water, and, you know, an hour later, I was having, like, a life-changing moment. Like, I feel really good right now, and I want more of this. And how do I find more of this? What were you doing in San Francisco? Were you in this world in any capacity, or no? Not at all. No, my former career in finance. So I was on Wall Street working for an investment bank for five years, and then I shifted my career into brand management for restaurant groups. So while I was in business school, I worked for Taco Bell and Wolfgang Puck really started to understand the value of consumer insights, putting the customer at the center of the company of the design process, and thought that I was actually going to start a restaurant business before trying CBD for the first time and completely shifting gears. Wow. So what was your first step? So you had it, you tried it, you enjoyed the experience, and now you're like, how do I get more of it, or is this even a company? Is it viable? Yeah. I mean, all of that kind of happened at the same time. So I got my cannabis prescription. I started looking at what products were on the market, went into natural food stores where they were also selling some CBD products, and saw within two weeks that there really wasn't a brand, a single brand that I felt connected to. Meanwhile, I had already met my co-founder, and we had already talked about starting a business together. She was on board with a restaurant idea, but I also had to convince her to, you know, move towards cannabis, which for her at the time was a little shocking. She is from Chicago, was wondering what her parents were going to think, but once she tried it, she got on board, and yeah, we shifted gears within, you know, a few weeks of having tried CBD. We were already thinking about starting a CBD company. Well, that's the stigma right there that I think most people have to overcome. I mean, I just, from my own experience with CBD, it took a while because I've never been a fan of smoking anything, which is why I never really got into marijuana itself. When I heard of CBD, I didn't understand necessarily that there was no THC in CBD, so it did take a while for me to even open up to the possibilities of CBD, whereas, you know, once I did, then I found out like, oh, this is not a drug like THC is. Yeah, it's not psychoactive. No, not at all. I started using it to help me recover from athletics and to get better sleep at night. Like all these really beneficial aspects of the, I guess, whatever you would call the active ingredient within CBD. And, you know, even my dad, you know, he was walking through a farmer's market in Westwood with me, and he was just like, yeah, I don't know about that. And this was before I'd really gotten into it. I was like, yeah, I don't know either. But it's probably something that you've run into, right, in the course of this company is getting over that hump in educating the market. Like, this is way different than everything that you've been told. Like, how do you guys even approach getting that message across to consumers? Yeah, that's exactly it. It's education. So when you say stigma, what's interesting is, and I would have expected that there would have been a stigma. But even in 2015, we did some consumer insights work, and we realized very quickly that there's really not a stigma around cannabis anymore. Like, it's one of the few bipartisan issues now. 70% of Americans believe that marijuana should be legalized. And we're not even talking about, you know, hemp-derived CBD, which is a lot less controversial. So that was never what we thought we were trying to solve for. What we thought we were trying to solve for was education part. Like, how are we going to actually explain to people what this is? Because people tune out. I mean, and I do too. I've had to become sort of an expert on what is a cannabinoid and how do you derive them. But before that, you know, I was a history major. I didn't study science. And so, as I'm reading about like what makes CBD, CBD, and why is it different from THC, my whole thought process was how can I distill this down to sort of the most basic information while still treating our consumers like they're smart? And that was always really important to me. That's actually part of the reason why we called the company Sage Leads. This idea of the sage, which stands for wisdom and discovery and healing and knowledge. And there were brands already on the market that were sort of like snake oil-ish. Like, this is a cure-all and you don't need to know why it helps but just buy it. And we were trying to take the opposite approach, which is, you know, we want you to learn about what this is so that you can decide on your own whether this is a good product for you to try. What was your first product? What was the first thing you guys brought to market? It's in front of you. So this is our relief and recovery cream. And Kaylee and I started the company with $30,000. We each put in $15,000 of our savings, and we were able, with that money, to put up a really shitty website and create one product, which looks different than it did back then. But this is essentially the same formula that we used, you know, back in 2015 when we were formulating. And how did you sell it? Like, where did you go? Was it direct to consumer? Was it a website? What was that like? We had a Shopify account. That was day one. And then we were door-to-door salespeople. So I don't actually spend a ton of time in this part of LA, but there are a lot of dispensaries in this part of LA. I was, like, literally walking down the street, knocking on doors, hey, do you want to carry a CBD cream? And, you know, same with natural food stores, even though our product is from hemp, we knew that people who shopped at dispensaries would, at that time, be more open to trying these kinds of products. So we no longer sell in dispensaries. We haven't in years. But the early days, that was what, like, give us cash flow because they paid on delivery as opposed to the natural food stores like Erwan, you know, which wanted terms. And so we literally just got ourselves into over 200 stores just by, you know, making calls and visiting stores and talking to the buyers. And that was the point at which we had, I think, you know, really proven that there was a market for this. And who was buying it? How did you guys get any sort of data back as to who your customer is, what they look like, what they value? So the easiest thing was just looking at the Shopify data. You know, you can get a sense of the gender, maybe not as much the age, but we started converting people into our email list. And very early on, we created an insider's consumer insight program where we started asking survey questions of people who had opted in. And then also literally just doing demos at stores and seeing who was stopping to ask us questions. And who was it? Who was it mostly that was buying your product? Always women. And that was by design online today. We know that still 80% of our consumers are women. And why I say by design is because when we did that market research initially, we realized that all of the brands were very masculine. And women deal disproportionately with issues that CBD can help. So things like trouble sleeping, stress, pain. And so we designed the product to not be, you know, it's not pink, like it wasn't meant to be a turnoff to guys, but the goal was that it actually felt feminine. And so it was a lot of women. And in the early days, it was a lot of women who were sort of around our own age, the millennials and then around our mom's age and their, their boomers. And that's actually really stayed true to this day. When I had a bow tie company, what was fascinating about that was bow ties are meant for men, but women would buy them. And so the woman would would look online and go, Oh, we have this wedding coming up and she would match the bow tie to whatever she was wearing. And so we found this data, right? We were like, Oh my goodness, it's the woman making the decision to purchase and even using her car, she's paying for it. But the men is wearing the product. And so we had to change up our packaging and our websites. So it was a little bit softer, I guess, and not so even though the product is literally most like 98% of the time worn by men. And so it was this fascinating thing where we had to change it to make it better packaging way night because we knew the woman was sometimes going to gift it to her husband or boyfriend at the time. But that's not a huge surprise to me because women spend a lot of the household money, like they just are the ones with the purse strings. So my wife actually turned me on to your product. And so she, she came home with it. And I was like, Oh, where'd you get that? She said the paper source. And I said the paper source, which is where she goes oddly enough to like return UPS packages. And so while she was there, she was like, Yeah, I saw this. And I figured it was amazing. And I use it all the time now, which with this product, which is pretty cool. And then we talked to Beam, they also have like this topical CBD, but it doesn't, you don't feel anything. And so when I was, when I was put, it's like a bomb. So when I was putting it on, I thought to myself, this is really interesting because although I just had them on the podcast and I heard all the science and I trust them, I believe them, all the stuff, I don't feel anything. Right. And I was thinking from a consumer perspective, I wonder how many consumers try to put this on and expect something like with icy hot or something. And then your product is exactly that. You feel something immediately. And so was that totally by design? Did you recognize that problem for sure? Yeah, absolutely. Because CBD also depends on how you use it and what else is in the product, but it doesn't necessarily work the first time you use it. It has to build up in your system over time. We knew we needed to create a habit for people. We wanted to incentivize them to try it more than once because while you do get the benefits of the menthol and the peppermint oil in the product, the first time you use it, there are additional benefits to having that CBD used repeatedly. And so, yeah, we wanted it to feel good and very smart. At least I was like, oh, this is very intelligent of them to do this. Products need to have a great experience. And that was a huge shortcoming in the industry. People weren't really taking into account, like, how does this product smell? Like most of the products even today, they smell like weed. It's not, you know, I mean, maybe, like, if someone's smoking, that's one thing, but you don't want to smell. You don't want to smell like weed. Right. It reminds me of the vacuum. And so like when they designed the vacuum, same thing, people want that that instant feedback. They want to hear the stuff hitting the walls of the vacuum so they know it's working. So imagine if you're vacuuming your house, and you hear nothing, you would go this thing isn't working, right? You have kids, you know, there's stuff on the floor. Yeah. And so in the design of the vacuum, they literally purposely put a plastic coating so that you can hear everything here. And that's market research. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. And it makes sense though, which is the same thing what you're doing. I mean, it's like the human does, the human does expect some sort of feedback. And that loop is up to you to create. And you can have fun doing it. The vacuum certainly is the example. I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper to the science behind it, because I'm fascinated by all of the CBD products out there available, like one says for your back, one says for sleep, like whatever it might be, because I know CBD is essentially an anti-inflammatory. And are there different like doses for whatever the ailment might be on the packaging? And how much time or how much of it has to build up in your body before it truly starts working? Like how many are we talking days a week, like whatever might be? Yeah. So I'll tell you what we know. And then I'll tell you what we don't know, which is still a lot. What we know is that CBD works with a system in our bodies called the endocannabinoid system. And the endocannabinoid system has receptors from our brains all the way to our toes. And it works with known chemical compounds that are found in the body. So for example, the runner's high that comes from a chemical compound called anandamide. CBD works very similarly to an anandamide. There are also receptors in both the brain and the body, which is why it can have effects to both mental and physical health. So we know how it works with the body. And when you were asking, I thought you were going somewhere a little different with the question, I thought what you were going to say is like a product that's made for sleep versus a product that's made for pain, like, are they actually working differently? The answer to that question is no, like the CBD works exactly the same way. We have our relief and recovery cream, which has essential peppermint oil. And then we have a Coleman centered version, which has lavender essential oil. The CBD is working the same way. It's not like we've created like a different compound for each of the products. We've changed the essential oil because lavender is calming and peppermint is stimulating. What we don't know is stuff around dosage. That's going to be something and I hate to ever give the pharmaceutical industry credit, but that's going to be something that they probably will have to step in to do because it just costs way too much money, you know, millions and millions of dollars to do the kinds of studies that are required to say that a person who is, you know, 150 pounds should take X whereas a person who's 250 should take Y. It seems like CBD works with everyone's systems differently. And so when people are asking us about dosage, the best answer we can give is that you really just have to see what's right for you. So we always recommend that people start with, let's say 10 milligrams. If you're taking a capsule or a tincture, start with 10 milligrams, take it every day for a week. Are you getting the desired effects? If not, then take more. Some of the pharmaceutical studies have included doses up to 600 milligrams. So the one drug that's been approved for use with CBD in the US has a dosage of 600 milligrams and that's for children. So there is going to be some really interesting stuff that comes out over the next few years as we see the FDA get more involved, which they need to. And as we, you know, see the real separation of a product that is a cosmetic or an over-the-counter drug versus something that's a prescription, but it's not, it's not simple. Is the reason why Big Pharma and the FDA haven't gotten involved just yet is because marijuana itself remains a schedule one drug. Does that have anything to do with the lack of clinical studies into the effects of CBD? Yeah, that has everything to do with it. It's really difficult to study drugs that are schedule one. And there actually are pharmaceuticals that are developing drugs that use cannabinoids, not just CBD, but THC and CBN and CBG, but we will definitely see more of them as it becomes better regulated. And the one pharmaceutical that has the drug that's been approved, they've done a lot of the studies. And so I can't be totally mad at them because they have in some ways paved the way to say, this is a safe ingredient. Like there were no, you know, negative side effects to the people who were in the trial. And so that helps. I was reading like, I guess that one time early days of research, they were always starting the hypothesis with like, why is this bad? And so it was almost this thing where researchers were trying to find something wrong, and they would find it maybe 10 out of 1000 people. And so they'd have to write, these are the impacts negative. Here's what it is. Instead of coming from the research of like, is this good? And I think maybe that shifted in the early 2000s, but that's what did it for marijuana. And just that realization of all the research before that has just been trying to become like bad, essentially trying to find a false narrative or find a problem. Yeah, that's so true. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. I think it's a really exciting time right now for not just cannabis, but you know, psychedelics, like psilocybin. And people are taking it more seriously and starting to see the value in some of these drugs, ketamine. We talked of Mind Bloom, which is a company that uses ketamine for mental for like the cure depression anxiety. And they have like a five, almost like a five week program where a person comes in, they get microdosed. And then at some point they have them confront like it's almost like the ketamine allows them to confront the thing that they're so afraid of nine perfect strangers or just a movie or not a movie, but a television show right now. That's how Nicole Kidman, it actually touches on that. It doesn't specifically state ketamine. It mentions psychedelics, but it's basically you, you see all the people go to like this retreat and they're all dealing with and they're all getting microdosed while they're at the retreat center. And over the course of the time, they end up actually dealing with the problem in a psychedelic way. Yeah. I don't know if you've read Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, but I highly recommend it if you're interested in learning more about the benefits of psychedelics, because he basically says it allows you to get enough distance from yourself to view your own problems from, you know, as an outsider as opposed to being so wrapped up in them and having such like a rote reaction to the same thing over and over again. So do all your products have CBD? No. So, um, yeah, less people that are like watching or listening think that I'm selling the mushrooms. Our products are not psychoactive. None of them are. So we have our line of CBD products. And then we also have a line of products that's actually sitting in front of you that don't contain CBD and they are just essentially, you know, natural versions of pain relief products. So if you walk through the aisle of your local drugstore, you're not going to see a lot that's new there. It's been gay. It's icy hot. Like the most exciting thing to happen to the aisle is that the bio freeze decided to stop selling in just like physical therapist offices. And so we thought there should really be a line of products a natural because you don't need, there's so many chemical compounds that are in typical drugstore products, but be like all of those products have, you know, you can picture it like a man and he has his arm on his back and it has like a red radiating spot and it's kind of cheesy. It's a good marketing exercise, right? It's like close your eyes and picture this product and it's always the man or on his back, hand on shoulder, hand on back. Yeah, or lower back, like, but you can see it, right? The rest of it is in black and white, except for the glowing red area. Yes. So why should that not be feminine? Like women are dealing disproportionately with chronic pain and also like why can't these products be pleasurable? Like if you're in pain, you kind of need more pleasure than the average person anyway. Like you want the product to smell good and feel good and also like look nice on your, in your medicine cabinet. Yeah. Did you raise capital at some point for the business? Yeah. So we ran the business just with that original $30,000 investment for the first year and a half. And then by the time we reached certain milestones, we had gotten ourselves into more than 200 stores. We had reached more than half a million in revenue and we also had been able to turn a profit. We thought, okay, we have a pretty good story to tell. We also knew who was buying our product. And so we felt like we were pretty close to product market fit. And so that was the point at which we started getting outside investors involved. And what was the plan? So once you've raised this capital, was it just more stores? So basically doubling down on the existing model that seems to be working? We always wanted to have a mix of D to C and retail. So that was the plan. Okay. And were you still in San Francisco at the time or did you end up moving? No. We founded the business here in LA. I moved back to LA to go to business school and my co-founder was already living in LA. So this has been an amazing place to start a health and wellness business. And particularly in the broader cannabis space, it was a great place. Are the products in front of us, these four products? Is this everything that you guys make or is there so much more? There's a lot more. Yeah, we have, it's actually, like, I don't know the exact number anymore, but I want to say we have around 16 products today. Okay. And what do they all do? So we have these that we would call pain relief, icy hot, Ben gay. Exactly. So those are our pain relief products and those just launched at Target. So those are exclusively at targetandtarget.com. Super excited about that. Target was always a dream retailer for us to work with. And we're really excited to build the brand more there. And then our other products are CBD-infused products. So we have the Relief and Recovery Collection. It helps with discomfort. I can't say pain because I'm not allowed to. That's not what these products are for. It's for discomfort. Wait, why aren't you not allowed to? Because the FDA regulates what we are and are not allowed to say. So that's a word controlled by the FDA? It's controlled by what studies you have on file for your products and they currently do not allow CBD products, even that have gone through rigorous testing to claim that they're for pain. But it seems like all of these products exist in an anti-inflammatory usage space. I have seen recently a trend of CBD in just about anything imaginable, like specifically cosmetics. And to me that seems like just a fad or an unnecessary application for it just to try and I don't even know what the benefit would be to some of these products. Have you seen this? And is this something that, is there any benefit at all to having it in makeup or something like that where it's not necessarily for anti-inflammatory? Is there any other usage that someone could get out of this? Yeah, depends on what you're talking about though. So if we were talking about like a serum for the face, we have a serum because it's not just anti-inflammatory. It's also antioxidant and CBD is a part of the hemp plant. We use hemp oil in our products. Hemp oil has a lot of vitamins and fatty acids that are good for the skin. Where I start to roll my eyes is when I see like a CBD mascara or a CBD shampoo, something that is, you know, not going to ever enter the bloodstream or the dermis for that matter. Like CBD that goes on your hair will never, it's not going to affect you. Unless you're like really massaging it into your scalp. Sure, yeah, a scalp product could potentially. I've never showered like that. You got to rinse and repeat with that stuff. I know that's a problem. I bet that would feel good. Was this always your plan or did it kind of just accelerate to a point where, right, so at the beginning you have a hypothesis, you're solving a problem, you have some market research, but now you're in 15,000 stars. Did you have a sense that it could be this big? Yes, actually, because access was always the goal, you know, more than like revenue or it was how can we provide access to this compound to as many people as we can. And we wanted it to be accessible to people outside of places just like LA and New York. And so some of the branding exercise was also not to make it like too cool. Like it wasn't supposed to be trendy, it was supposed to be something trustworthy and accessible. And so getting into doors across the country, being successful, you know, in the middle of the country and not just in places like LA was always the goal because in many ways, you know, people who live in the middle of the country have less access to cannabis than people who live in LA. How do we get to Indiana? That's the start-up conundrum. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I knew from actually working at Taco Bell that we have a lot of trends here that don't end up making it like when I worked there, I remember suggesting, like, why don't we just add guacamole to everything? And I was like, well, a lot of people in the country don't actually like avocados. I was like, what? Like my mind was blown, you know, living in California, you think everyone eats them for every meal? So yeah, having a broad appeal was very important to us. And then because of the challenges that we've experienced on the D to C side of our business, it became clear that being successful in retail was really important. And at what point did you even consider selling the company? We considered selling the company more recently when we were starting to go out to raise more money. We had some retailer opportunities. We had some marketing things that we wanted to spend on, some hires we wanted to make. And the conversations that became more fruitful were the conversations that were about acquisition. Beyond that, the company that we ended up selling our business to, they're called the hemfusion wellness. They have just a world-class regulatory and quality program. And we were excited for our brand, which excels at sales and marketing to have a stronger backbone in things that really, really matter in our category. So we always did everything we possibly could to ensure that our products were really high quality, but we've also been a small company. And so hemfusion has spent millions of dollars in time to ensure that their products are incredibly safe and effective. And so that was really attractive to us in thinking about what is the next 10 years of this brand going to look like. And how long was the courting process with them and the due diligence and all that fun stuff? Probably around six months. We had actually met them before and the people who had started it and just kept in touch. And yeah, COVID was an interesting time. So it definitely just made, I think, everyone think about how can we optimize for the future? We were sort of going about our business as if nothing was going to change. And then COVID makes you think everything can change overnight. So the industry was consolidating. It still is. Supposedly there are 3,500 brands that sell CBD products. And there's going to be a point at which when the FDA comes in, a lot of those brands are not going to cut it. They don't have the quality standards. When do you think that is? When do you think that'll happen? That's like a billion dollar, $25 billion question is what the size of the space is supposed to be when that happens. I'm hoping in the next year. I think Biden, he's on it to some extent. I think people thought he would have been on a little bit more. Yeah, Biden is actually surprisingly conservative when it comes to cannabis legislation. Separating that though from what's going on with CBD. CBD has always been a very popular thing to support because even Mitch McConnell, Kentucky has a lot of farmers and their state and hemp is a really productive, environmentally friendly crop to grow. And so when I say bipartisan, people who live in Colorado think that CBD should be available to them. And so do people in Kentucky. So my hope is in the next year, but I have said that before. So are you restricted by certain state's laws on marijuana as a whole? Even though there's no THC, are you still restricted by those rules and regulations into selling? Not technically, but it ends up working that way anyway. Is it a shipping issue? It's not shipping. It's things like banking. I had trouble getting a mortgage. Like even though I run a hemp business, typical banks did not want to give me a mortgage. So think about what that means for the actual business itself. Doesn't surprise me. Banks are concerned about the headline risk. That's the biggest thing. And so it's less of a they don't like you or they don't recognize your business. It's more of they don't want the headline. They don't want AOC to be interviewing them and saying, why are you giving money? You know, that's the problem. Yeah. And same thing with advertisers, by the way. So Facebook still bans. Exactly. We still can't advertise on Google and Facebook. What do you guys do instead of that? Do you just go screw it? We'll just post and not like how do you how do you end up marketing or I guess paid marketing in this environment? Yeah, there's not as many opportunities as a typical e-commerce brand. So we are very focused on organic acquisition as it relates to things like SEO, email, social, but then we're also running some top of funnel campaigns, things like OTT. There are actually networks that are open to advertising CBD products. If you follow the rules, which we do, so. Okay. Yeah, you could like literally boost a post for anti-vax videos, but not CBD. Right. Which is interesting science of the times as it relates to you. So you sold your business, you got to stay on for a little while. What do you see for your future? You personally? What I love about what I do is making people feel better and getting to build a brand. And so I still feel really, really strongly like Sage Lee is my first baby. I have since actually had a baby since starting the business as has my co-founder, but this will always be my first baby and I care so deeply about the people that we serve. So haven't figured out, you know, what's next in my mind and still very much committed to ensuring that the business does well. What was your employees reaction when they found out about the acquisition? I mean, because we talked with another founder who sold his company to GoDaddy. And because GoDaddy was a publicly traded company, he had to basically keep everyone in the dark outside of a few people up until the moment that it was publicly announced. And he said that, you know, he went, walked into his office and they made this big announcement and the first reaction, like they had planned this big party afterwards. But the first reaction wasn't so much excitement as it was nervousness because everyone's immediately thinking, am I still going to have a job? Did you experience anything like that with your employees? Like when could you start to tell them and what was their reaction to that? Yeah, I would say that it was pretty similar when you're dealing with public companies, the circle of people that you're allowed to actually bring into the deal is very, very small. With that said, you know, the team knew that we were out raising money and that we had said many times, like there's a lot of change going on in the industry. And so when we explained that the reason why the acquisition made sense was to bolster quality, to have a better regulatory framework, they got it. And everyone wants the brand. I mean, we are currently the best selling CBD topical brand in the country, in retail. And that requires investment. And so we have amazing employees who are incredibly smart and they understand that if we don't do anything that the brand will suffer. So they were on board, understandably had a lot of questions, but on board. Congratulations. That's super exciting. You saw it through. You found the finish line. Thank you. And now you're on board for your next adventure. Just so everyone really can find Sage Lee, I guess some of the local stores, most of our listeners are in LA. Obviously, we have some in Massachusetts, some in Ohio. Easiest is Sage Lee Naturals.com. And then if you want to buy it in store, we're at CVS, Airwan. Target. Yeah, Target for the non CBD line. Actually, we have a store locator on our website. So if you put in your zip code at Sage Lee Naturals.com, you can find the closest store to you. Kerrigan, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. Pleasure having you.