Full Contact Sport

Dave Morrow’s entrepreneurial journey from champion lacrosse star to
cannabis power player is an epic path of unconventional pivots. As the CEO
of Lume Cannabis Co., he’s grown the Michigan-based company from $2 million
in revenue to nearly $200 million in just four years, making it one of the
most successful vertically integrated cannabis enterprises in the US.

His story begins in Michigan, far from the traditional East Coast lacrosse
hotbeds. Despite his geographical disadvantage, Morrow became one of the
sport’s top players. “I was the first American player that wasn’t from the
East Coast to achieve a high level of success,” he says. His rise to
lacrosse stardom was memorialized by several impressive achievements at
Princeton, including one of only a few players in the history of the sport
to be named Player Of The Year as a defenseman. Morrow went on to play
seven years on the US national team.
Morrow captured during his standout career on Princeton University’s
championship lacrosse team.

While playing the sport he loved, Morrow identified a need for more robust
and lighter lacrosse sticks. In 1992, he developed an innovative titanium
shaft that revolutionized lacrosse. This invention laid the foundation for
Warrior Sports, which Morrow would “form a dorm room business into a global
sports brand.” His experience as an elite athlete lent cred to the Warrior
brand, while his background working in his father’s machine shop in Detroit
provided crucial manufacturing knowledge, including how to scale
manufacturing operations. A dozen years after he founded the company, he
sold it to New Balance in 2004. Morrow continued serving as CEO of Warrior
until January 2019.

Morrow says his background in lacrosse and building a global sports brand
influenced his approach to business. High-level sports instilled resilience
and adaptability within him—traits crucial for successfully maneuvering
through the ever-changing landscape of the cannabis industry.

He says he had a relationship with cannabis in college and that he smoked
joints during his lacrosse days and that it improved his performance. “I
really enjoyed cannabis,” Morrow says. “Frankly, I believe it helped me
become an elite athlete. Because I wasn’t dehydrated, I wasn’t experiencing
a lot of the same effects my peers had from drinking all the time. I took a
lot of shit for smoking weed. Princeton athletes typically didn’t do that.”

His move into cannabis came from a persuasive nudge from a trusted friend
who was already invested in Michigan’s cannabis industry. “I said, ‘Listen,
man, I’ll consider this, but there’ll be some stipulations. It has to be
legal; we have to get licensed. I’m not going to do this rogue. Plus, I
want it to be adult use; I wasn’t interested in the medical business,’”
Morrow says. “I was really interested in the challenge of building a
consumer brand. I’m an expert at brand building, product development and
product design—I’ve been doing it my whole life. But I don’t know shit
about cultivating weed. But I know that no matter what category you’re in,
if you make an amazing product, people will come back. If you make shitty
products, they won’t come back.”
[image: lume cannabis] [image: Lume cannabis harvest]A snapshot from Lume’s
fall harvest. Lume is projecting to harvest more than 150,000 pounds of
cannabis in 2024.

In 2018, the Wolverine State legalized adult-use cannabis with the passing
of the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act. The following
year, Morrow founded Lume Cannabis Co., bringing his entrepreneurial
expertise and innovative approach to the rapidly growing industry. One of
the initial challenges Morrow faced was access to capital. He had to rely
heavily on friends, family and his own network to raise the capital needed
to get Lume off the ground, as it was challenging to access traditional
financing sources.

“The part that was the hardest thing for me to get used to was people
saying ‘no’ all the time and not getting access to money,” he says.
However, his business acumen came through and he would raise “close to a
quarter of a billion dollars” through friends and family. “We never did any
sponsored raises, private equity or hedge funds. It was all friends and
family.”

Lume specializes in various cannabis products, including flower,
cartridges, concentrates, edibles, topicals and CBD. The company’s success
and solid foundation in the Midwest have positioned it for potential
expansion into other markets, including plans to enter into Florida.
Despite facing challenges such as plummeting retail prices in Michigan,
Lume has flourished by investing in technology and automation to cut
production costs by 50 percent. Today, Loom has 38 retail stores, 300,000
square feet of indoor grow and seven million square feet of outdoor. Lume
is projecting to harvest more than 150,000 pounds of cannabis this year.
Lume has 38 retail stores currently.

Morrow explains that the company’s approach involved prioritizing the
production of high-quality products at scale, ensuring that they could
provide top-shelf offerings as well as competitive pricing for customers,
similar to strategies that many other consumer packaged goods companies
employ. Morrow stresses scalable manufacturing as crucial for success in
the cannabis industry. Drawing from his experience with Warrior Sports,
Lume focuses on achieving high unit volume with consistent quality at low
cost. He believes that having a repeatable manufacturing process capable of
scaling to meet demand is vital for Lume’s long-term growth strategy.

Morrow’s vision for his company is to make cannabis products available to a
broad spectrum of consumers, catering “from the casual user to the
connoisseur” and providing products at various price points to ensure
accessibility while maintaining quality. He says he envisions a bright
future for products beyond traditional flower options—particularly
emphasizing smokeless alternatives that cater to evolving consumer
preferences.
“We want to make cannabis accessible,” Morrow says.

As Lume continues its growth trajectory under Morrow’s leadership, he
insists that he remains focused on innovation and scalability within the
cannabis sector, focusing on developing “innovative products” that “make
people happy.”

“We want to make cannabis accessible, from the connoisseur to the casual
user and everyone in between,” Morrow says. “I think being smokeless will
be very important in the future. I’m not running down flower but look at
the way big tobacco is going with vapes and pouches. With cannabis, we have
drinks, we have topicals—I think there’s a big future for cannabis outside
of just combustibles.”

A big future is something Dave Morrow has always known a lot about.

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