When Shawntel Ludwig sold her vaporizer company Da Vinci to cannabis retailer Greenlane Holdings (NASDAQ: GNLN), she envisioned taking the brand to new heights. Instead, she bought it back two years later, hoping to breathe new life into the struggling business she had built from scratch.
Ludwig, now CEO of Synergy Innovation, is working not only on DaVinci but also on rebuilding the Eyce brand, which suffered under Greenlane's ownership.
“We're here to fix it,” Ludwig told Green Market Report. “Both brands stand on their own.”
The entrepreneurial journey in the cannabis accessories market began in 2011 when he co-founded DaVinci. For over 15 years, Ludwig helped grow the brand into a respected name in the accessories industry.
After years of upswings, including expansion into global markets, Ludwig and his partners decided to move into Green Lane in 2021 with the hope that the brand would “really blossom into what it was meant to be.” She said she has decided to sell.
The move was expected to propel DaVinci to new heights by leveraging Greenlane's resources and market position after a decade of growth.
But Greenlane “did too many things too quickly,” Ludwig said. “I started thinking maybe we didn’t have the horsepower needed to join this $200 million company.”
Things quickly unraveled. Shortly after the acquisition, “a perfect storm happened and things started to go wrong,” she said. Operational failures, including a failed ERP system implementation, combined with Greenlane's ambitious “too-big-to-fail” expansion plans, nearly led to the collapse of both DaVinci and Eyce.
“Customer service collapsed, global inventory collapsed,” Ludwig recalled. The Eyce brand went nearly a year without purchasing inventory, losing valuable shelf space in the process.
Faced with mounting problems, Ludwig and his partners decided to acquire the brand in May 2023. Ludwig is now CEO of Synergy Innovation, focused on rebuilding trust and revitalizing the company's product line.
The company has already released a new product, IQ3, under the DaVinci brand. Ludwig is also looking to expand into the concentrate market and is considering ways to diversify Ace's brand offering. He also revealed that Synergy Innovation is already working on two deals to add more products to its portfolio.
The brand is currently well on its way to recovery, but the road has not been smooth. During its first month back in control, the company had to deal with a backlog of customer service issues, including replacing more than 700 outstanding warranty claims.
Ludwig said he personally contacted dozens of customers to reassure them that “the founders are back at the helm.”
For Ludwig, the lessons were about resilience and adaptability.
“If we were going to change things, we would structure the contract differently,” she said. “Now, after four reverse splits, we would have gotten just as many shares, because they wouldn’t be worth anything.”
She said she's focused on steady growth and maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit that helped build DaVinci in the first place.
The CEO aims to leverage the team's expertise in product design and innovation to build a “home of brands” in the cannabis accessories space. To that end, the company is focused on manufacturing hardware rather than expanding into cannabis and hemp products.
“We're coming out of the gate strong,” Ludwig said.
