Hi there, and welcome to The Dealers Diary - my musings on the cannabis industry, California, and building Halara.
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In today's entry: Our traffic spiked and we don't know why | SF Pride recap | King Fatso spotlight
The Dealers Desk
Hey Dealers,
Last week's issue was the "come find us" call. This one's the recap.
Jackie and Xochitl loaded up the car with hundreds of Lychee Goji Berry Tea cartridges (the LGBT strain, 10% of profits going to LYRIC, if you've been following along the last couple issues) and drove into San Francisco for Pride weekend, June 27 and 28. No booth, no table, no line to wait in, just two people walking the crowd and handing product straight to whoever wanted one.
Cooler bag full of Lychee Goji Berry Tea cartridges staged in a car before SF Pride, tagged @sanfranciscopride
The cooler, loaded and ready, before the parade
That's the part I like about doing it this way. This is gifting. A booth is a transaction. Hand-to-hand is a moment, and you can see it in the second photo: someone in rainbow beads and an LA jersey getting handed the box, mid-parade, no cash register in sight.
Hand to hand, no booth, no line
We don't have an exact count on how many went out, just hundreds across the weekend, but the point was never the number anyway. Sacramento Pride, the strain deep-dive, the LYRIC donation, and now this: same thread, three issues running, and it's the kind of thing that only works if you keep showing up instead of just talking about it once.
Onwards and upwards,
-Malcolm
What We're Seeing
The honest answer is we don't know: Traffic on our Pineapple Express and Guava Gelato pages jumped something like 300% this week, enough to nearly max out our website's usage allowance, and neither Nick nor I can explain it. First guess was an influencer post. Nick checked: one of his Pride creators had a pink guava device on camera but never named the strain or said Halara. So the spike is real and the reason isn't there. Most brands would spin that into a story about organic momentum. Truth is small brands have wires you can't always see get tripped, and if you were one of the people looking up either strain this week, we'd genuinely love to know what sent you there.
Strain Spotlight
Here's Nick on it:
King Fatso is a live resin sauce, indica, 83% THC. Myrcene, caryophyllene, and linalool do the work here: deep, dank earthiness on the inhale, then a sweet, almost hash-like finish that coats the back of your throat on the way out. That myrcene-linalool combo is what tips this into full couch-lock territory, the kind where you sit down meaning to get up in twenty minutes and just don't. Relaxed, calm, sleepy, in that order. Reserve it for a night with nowhere to be.
King Fatso, live resin sauce
We don't usually get to back a spotlight with a stranger's own words, but this one showed up unprompted weeks ago and we never ran it. Here it is.
710 is just over a week out. If concentrates are your thing, this is the one to have on hand.
If a heavy, fruit-then-fuel indica is your lane, this is the one to ask for by name. Find a shop carrying it.
Dealers Choice
This one landed in our DMs the same week as the Pride recap, unprompted, no name attached: "This has to be one of the best cartridges I've ever smoked, I genuinely am amazed by this product, I've only started smoking cannabis since October 2025, but these flavors are literally nothing like the other vapes, I love fruity cartridges and stuff or whatever, your a genius and also humorous bc so many brands are so boring 😭 thank you for making this product 🐿️." Followed immediately by a meme of Michael Jordan crying into his championship trophy, captioned "Me today when my local dispensary had your carts." We didn't write the caption. We just said thank you.
Unprompted, unedited, un-boring
Coming Soon
Two dates worth circling. July 10 is 710, the dab holiday, so the resin and rosin lineup (King Fatso included) gets its moment. Then July 17-19 we're at the CA State Fair with ECCO, running the Pineapple Express AIO on the floor, smooth and anti-clog, exactly the reputation that got it picked for the booth. More details as it comes together.
Coming Soon
Two dates worth circling. July 10 is 710, the dab holiday, so the resin and rosin lineup (King Fatso included) gets its moment. Then July 17-19 we're at the CA State Fair with ECCO, running the Pineapple Express AIO on the floor, smooth and anti-clog, exactly the reputation that got it picked for the booth. More details as it comes together.
Quick Hits
Mystery strain, still unclaimed, hint #8: Where things stand: not a mixture of our High THC strains, there's a song-based hint in the mix, and Nick's on-camera clue was "a strain we've run in live resin before." This week's hint isn't here at all, check our Instagram. $1,000 and the QR code's still on the bag. Enter here.
This is the #8 hint. I honestly wish i had a clue what Nick was getting at but I don’t hopefully y’all do
A stage for home growers: The 2026 California Cannabis Awards (the Golden Bears) land July 18 at the CA State Fair, and this year adds a brand-new Home Grow Competition, putting hobbyist growers on a mainstream public stage for the first time. Winner gets announced July 25, right after our own Fair run with ECCO. More from GreenState.
300+ workers walked off the job in Illinois: Teamsters Local 916 struck Ascend Wellness Holdings' licensed cultivation facility in Barry, Illinois on June 25. Not a Halara story, just real news worth knowing if you're paying attention to how labor is organizing in this industry. More from MJBizDaily.
Refer a Friend
Got a theory on why Pineapple Express and Guava Gelato spiked this week? Hit reply, we're stumped. Know someone who'd love a brand admitting that out loud? Forward this to them.
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Halara · Emerald Triangle, CA
My Munchies
From the feedback last week y’all liked the recipe so much I figured I’d add that as a fun little section each week. Here’s another one my fiancé and I made over the weekend. 10/10
P.S - My Weekly Bops
P.S. What I'm listening to these were in my spin class this week and i was jamming out to them
