We all know Alan Robbins. He's one of our good sponsors of Maxine Grady.
Absolutely. He's one of the funniest guys, too. I think he is joy when he's on the show.
And he owns herbal aspect. And so he's here to tell us all about herbal aspect and all the
things that are going on. Welcome back to the show, Alan. Oh my goodness.
Thanks for getting in here. Well, thank you for having me first off and happy holidays.
I'm wrong. You are always rocking. Oh, yeah. Well, this is a rocking time.
And I'm going to take a picture of you what you're wearing today because it's very different
than how he's usually dressed. He's usually dressed to the nines like he's going out somewhere fancy.
Fairly dapper. Yeah. You're not fancy. This is not fancy. Not the way he usually dresses,
but this is super cute. Well, I was reading 90 Alan. I'll tell you what happened. I was just a
you know, things get hectic around the holiday season with sales and with shopping and
especially over at herbal aspect. We've got this incredible sale going on right now where we're
giving 15% off of flour, 20% off of gummies all the way through tomorrow night because I know
that people need to find those last minute gifts. Well, they need to have a very merry holiday.
Christmas cheer. That's what we're talking about. You're not really an egg not person.
Oh, yeah. Right. Eggnog maybe. Eggnog. Yeah. Alan, tell us about your business, herbal aspect.
I mean, what's the mission of your company? What are you guys out to do? Yeah. Well, you know,
honestly, we really want to do good and well. And I understand that that's sort of a cliche
thing to say, but the truth of the matter is I look around and I see an incredible lack
of corporate social responsibility. And it's important to me to be something of an example for
my corporate peers in ways that we can, you know, impact our community positively where we can
have positive voices for change. And in as far as equity for our employees, we try to play
our employees. Well, I know for a fact that we pay our employees well above our industry standard,
our competitors, right? Good way to keep your employees to them. It's also just a really good
way to keep them invested in the job, right? To take ownership. But to free their mind to be able
to educate our customer because that's the second thing that herbal aspect really wants to do.
You know, we want to make sure that we're educating the customer, giving them quality products
and putting forth a cannabis experience that they know they can enjoy, right? You know,
I used to do a financial podcast and anybody that I would talk to would always say find those
local businesses that stand for the same things you do and then support the heck out of them.
So they stick around. They can keep their employees around. And that's exactly what you're saying.
Yeah, I love that. Well, you know, and what I say, excuse me is that there are so many small,
even small looking businesses that aren't small businesses. They're corporately owned out of state.
They're not even from here in Madison. Right. And more and more, I really like to support the
mom and pop businesses. And to me, a mom and pop business, right? If somebody where you can talk
to the owner, you can look the owner in the eye, you can purchase right from the owner. You can
ask them a question and they can answer you. Yeah. And we've asked lots of questions of Alan,
and he's never not had an answer. And I don't think we've ever, I don't think whether we've ever
had like a corporate sponsor. Everybody who's a sponsor of us are, guess what? They're businesses
that are owned by real people right here in Madison or at least Wisconsin, I guess.
And I mean, I know you guys, right? I know Jimmy K. You're like, I hang out with you at the at
wood fest. You folks are in my community, right? And it's so important to build a community,
not just around your business, but like to enrich that community with the things that you can do.
So like that's what herbal aspect wants to do. It wants to be a part of that community.
And then it wants to help to enrich the community by providing high quality products.
And I want to ask you last time you were on, at least when the last time when I was here and you
were on, you were talking about expanding. You know, and so I love this because here he is,
he's doing well in this community, but he's now expanding in the same community. So how many,
you have three now, right? Right now we have three. I mean, that's incredible. Yeah. I'm looking,
I've got a, it was very, very odd. I had a goal of opening three more locations by the end of 2024.
Wow. And I've, you know, strange things happen in December. I've got one place that we're looking
at pretty solidly going to take, going to take control of that property. And I had another one
that I was looking at that I was, you know, right there about to pull the trigger on. And we've
just decided to step back from that one because another location seems a little bit more appealing.
But I mean, you know, we're, we're pretty well on to, to, to, into that 2024 goal. So we're now at
this odd stage of kind of reestablishing, re reorienting, re-evaluating and looking at new ways to
expand. Congratulations. Yeah. And currently there's three stars, right? There's, there's
Cameron Road. There's University Avenue. And there's Winnebago over on the east side. Just came
from there. And was it a busy day? It was. I had a, you know, I had a guy come in my last customer
of the day, Luke, good guy. I didn't know anything about cannabis and really wanted to, to, to get a
full understanding of what he was putting into his body. That's why I was late. Oh, yeah. Well,
you know, if you're helping a customer and like you said, you want to educate. Hey, man,
well, it's Luke. He was a, he was a great customer too. I hope he has a good time. Remember,
buddy, take it low, take it slow. Well, you know, I mean, tell us about some of the products that
you actually carried, herbal, I aspect. I mean, you know, like what's poppy there? What's your
favorite flower? Flower is both your most popular and favorite flower is my favorite because I'm
an old school kind of guy. I, you know, I think that it goes generationally, right? I have a lot of
older folks that really like the edibles. A lot of my younger generation and actually some of those
those, some of those more discrete kind of age like, you know, folks around my age actually
would rather have cartridges, discrete ways of smoking are, are all the rage with some of those
more buttoned up folks, right? So my older folks, they like the edibles. Those are going to be my
gummies, chocolates, you know, I've got some taffies in for the holiday season. Wow. That's nice.
And they want to, oh yeah, the college age folks, they really love that THCA flower. Actually,
that's pretty popular across the board. Flower, THCA flower, it's, uh, it is all the rage.
Now it's being a flower. One thing that has become popular at all your stores is a thing called
the joint bar. I mean, when is happy? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So at the, at our build a blunt bar,
the joint bar is, you know, it was such a hit at gaming that I've expanded it to my other two
locations and it will be a permanent feature of every herbal aspect that we open up. What is it
work? So yeah, sure. So like, you know, that's where our flower is distributed from. And, um,
you can pick your size of a joint, right? We have three different sizes available at three
different price points ranging from like nine bucks up to 20 bucks. And then of course, you can
add on these sort of a lot of cart enhancements. You can get, you know, THCA powder put on there.
Grab some crumble diamonds for that. You can add some concentrates to it to really pack on a punch.
So I mean, if you're, there's a thing we call the granddaddy of them all. It's got all of the
concentrates and it comes in a Mike Tyson hemp wrap roll. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Sounds like it.
This is a granddaddy of them all. New meaning. Do you want fries with that?
You probably will want fries right now. It's a good time. It's a good time. And the joint bar is,
is a, wow, build a plant. Okay. Okay. So if people want to find locations or, or you even have
shopping online, which so many people love to do that too, what's the best? Where do they find you?
How do they find you? Google herbal aspect. And we should certainly pop up. Of course,
we have those three locations and you can hit us up at herbal aspect dot com. We're at 3547
University Avenue, 2017, Winnebago Street, and 7635 South Gammon Road right in that Woodman's
parking lot next to Dunkin Donuts. Wow. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming in. We really appreciate
it. It's great to talk to you when you come in here. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me and
enjoy your holidays. You too. I hope you get time off for a little bit at least.
It sounds like you're so busy, but please take a little time. Yeah. We're always going to be in the
clouds. It'll be okay. He's got three joint bars. Oh yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. Thank you. Thank
you so much, Ella. Great to have you in here today.
