Rewind: Inside Stiiizy, The World’s Best-Selling Weed Brand

James Kim’s Los Angeles-based cannabis company grew from a scrappy startup in 2017 to a legal unicorn worth $1.5 billion. Allegations of black-market activity and lawsuits be damned—Stiiizy aims to be the Nike of cannabis. Inside a warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles, next to a strip club, James Kim, the CEO and cofounder of the California-based cannabis brand Stiiizy opens the door to one of his grow rooms, revealing 972 pot plants, thriving three-foot-tall beauties two weeks from harvest. “This room is all money,” says Kim, who is 37 and has tattoos covering his arms, including a portrait of Ben Franklin and a rose made from a $100 bill. These days, Stiiizy is bringing in plenty of Benjamins. The company—which was founded in 2017 and grows cannabis, manufacturers vapes, pre-rolls, gummies and flower—has nearly 50 branded dispensaries across California and generates more than $800 million a year in revenue. Stiiizy, which is also California’s biggest cannabis retailer, is the best-selling weed brand in the country, according to sales data firm Headset. A vertically integrated powerhouse that now operates in seven states, one out of every eight cannabis products sold in the United States is a Stiiizy product. The company, which Forbes estimates to be valued at $1.5 billion, is privately held, secretive and mysterious—out of four original co-founders, only Kim would agree to speak, and he would not confirm the names of his partners. Founded in the gray market days before California legalized recreational marijuana, Stiiizy has also been dogged by lawsuits, rumors of illicit activity (all of which the company denies) and scandals, but none of that has changed the fact that in the $32 billion regulated cannabis industry, Stiiizy is the brand to beat. “We’re the number-one brand in the nation,” says Kim. “I always tell people, if we’re number one in the nation, we’re number one in the world.” A floor below the grow room, Kim walks through his production facility where dozens of employees in blue hairnets and facemasks brush mini blunts with a brown liquid and roll them into a half-pound of kief and put them into trays. In another room, a woman uses a machine to fill 100 Stiiizy vape pens at a time—by the end of the day, workers here will make nearly 100,000 of them. Every month, Stiiizy grows 15,000 pounds of weed and produces about $70 million worth (retail sales) of cannabis products in California, not including how much it produces in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and New York, where Stiiizy launched in February and rose to be among the top 10 best-selling brands within a month, according to Lit Alerts. Kim walks out of his warehouse and jumps in the back of his black Cadillac Escalade and his driver takes him a few minutes down the road to Stiiizy’s DTLA headquarters. “We always had dreams of the brand getting big,” says Kim, while Notorious BIG’s “Juicy” plays over the car speakers. “But we didn’t know it would be this big.” Kim, who sports an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak chronograph on his wrist, grew up humbly in Cerritos, California. He shared a bed with his older sister so his parents, both immigrants from South Korea, could rent out the other bedroom to help make ends meet. His parents sold women’s clothing at the local Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet and starting at six years old, young James was in charge of setting up the tent, manning the cash register and helping his mom set prices for clothes. (His mom taught him her strategy, which was to price each item at double her cost.) “They put me to work,” he says. “That swap meet was my life.” Read the full story here: By Will Yakowicz https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2025/04/18/inside-stiiizy-the-worlds-best-selling-weed-brand/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices