Building a Community-First Dispensary Brand with Rooted In

Rooted In wanted to build a dispensary brand that promoted generational wealth in Boston’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.

Rooted In

Rooted In is a Boston-based cannabis dispensary on a mission to build a community-driven brand. They are committed to engaging, serving, and uplifting marginalized communities through financial success and social responsibility. Given the complex history of cannabis, it was important to the Rooted In team – all also witnesses to the effects of their native Boston’s gentrification plans – that this noble mission was put first and foremost. Operationally, Rooted In did this by partnering with non-profit organizations to find local talent and hire those who had been negatively impacted by the War on Drugs. However, marketing-wise, they wanted the support of a specialized cannabis marketing agency to do it right.

Cannabis Creative designed a purpose-driven website for the Newbury St. dispensary.

The team at Rooted In came to Cannabis Creative with a defined visual brand identity and assets. However, they needed our design capabilities to translate this into a beautiful and user-friendly website.

With such a prime Boston dispensary location, Rooted In also wanted to embrace an upscale, boutique-style feeling that reflected the architecture of their store.

They were clear in their vision; the team wanted a website that would convey its message in a way that instilled customer confidence and loyalty for its products and mission.

Combining the powerful core values into an elegant and optimized website energized the Cannabis Creative team.

We got right to work as we do with all our website projects: mood boarding to align on a visual creative direction. Our experienced designers emphasized unique serif fonts that would complement the existing logos the Rooted In team came to us with.

Using the color palette and architectural design of their physical store, our website design team developed a striking combination of greens and beiges that tied in the grounded, purposeful feeling of the brand’s mission with the soft elegance of its dispensary visual identity.

To add an extra layer, we supplemented the typography with an elegant, handwritten script to bring out the custom, personalized feel of the Rooted In team. This also allows us to subtly highlight their female and minority ownership in a visual way.

All of these elements combined resulted in a website design that achieved the determined, yet feminine air of the Rooted In brand.

In addition to emphasizing the women-owned element of the brand, the Rooted In team wanted to pay a personal homage to their Black backgrounds and community-centered mission.

They did this with their logo, the Sankofa, an Adinkran symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana. This bird stands with its head gracefully facing its tail to teach us that we must look back (to our roots) in order to move forward. Our Cannabis Creative team loved how this clean image tied together culture, class, and cannabis.

Cannabis Creative was able to develop a purpose-driven, community-first, custom-built website that beautifully captured the brand’s mission while offering all the benefits of an optimized, mobile-ready website. As Rooted In opens doors on Newbury St., we’re excited to watch them make an impact in the Boston and Roxbury communities.