Botanica Marijuana dispensary reopened Thursday, Feb.
24, after a 10-month interior design
renovation. It was well worth the wait.
With the new renovation, display
cases line the walls with gold frames
and unique purple tiling. The tiling
focuses your eye on rotating joint
holders and green flower samples.
Throughout the store are smoothed
wooden displays with curved accents
that allow customers to touch
products.
Botanica co-owner Bryan Hill said
he’s been wanting to update the store
for a long time. He said he wanted to
bring people closer to cannabis, allowing customers to touch products and
interact with them.
“I think what we’re trying to do is
be able to serve people quickly if they
want to be quick, and slowly if they
want to take their time,” Hill said.
Hill sized up three types of cannabis
customers. The first is “self-checkout”
customers, who know exactly what
they want and don’t need help. The
second are regular customers who
want information about new products
in the store. The third bunch are the
new cannabis customers that need
support and education.
Hill says this renovation will cater to
all three customers.
Sales associates patrol the floor to
help customers with education and
product selection, but self-checkout
customers can scan QR codes on the
wooden display cases to place an order for a product themselves on their phone. The QR codes link directly to
the product category the customer
scans the code from.
One Botanica customer, Carla,
traveled from Casa Grande to see the
renovation on Thursday morning.
“They always have awesome deals,
the staff is super friendly and very
fast,” Carla said.
“The inside place
here, now that I’ve seen it, it is amazing. When they were redoing it in here
before, it was kinda crowded and it was
a long wait.”
Carla watched as she was notified her order was ready for pickup from
the cashier counter by a functional
art piece placed on the waiting area
wall. A majority of the wall is covered
with white cards that flip to reveal the
customer’s name when their order is
ready for pickup. Hill said they wanted
to entertain people while they waited
for their order.
“Every now and then it’ll wipe with
a cute little saying or something like
that,” Hill said.
To accommodate customers who
are concerned about COVID, Botanica also offers a new feature: a pickup
order window. If customers are looking
to order from their vast menu but feel
uncomfortable going inside, customers can order online and pick it up at
the window on the right side of the
building.
“We’re not going to have a second
store,” Hill said. “This is the only one
and we wanted it to be very Tucson,
very unreproducible, it only exists
here. You couldn’t take this and make
this work in California.”
Visit botanica.us to shop online or reserve time for a shopping tour with one
of the sales associates. Customers can
also go in person without an appointment at 6205 N. Travel Center Dr.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2022.