Founder of Wyld and Good Tide
The Hotbox with Dustin Hoxworth isn’t your polished PR interview. It’s me getting stoned and asking people the questions they probably aren’t ready for. These aren’t cold reads or copy-paste Q&As; I sit with my guests, usually multiple times, and I’ve likely met them in person, which gives me a window to learn who they really are before I ever send the questions. By the time the words hit the page, it’s smoke-thick honesty, not surface-level bullshit. These are cannabis conversations that showcase the voices, stories, and truths that won’t show up in the boardroom.
The Hotbox with Aaron Morris
Aaron Morris doesn’t ever really do interviews. He doesn’t chase press, podcasts, or panels. He doesn’t care about being known, photographed, or celebrated. He cares about building the best damn company that serves this industry, patients, customers, and his employees like no other.
So, getting to sit down with him, even just for an hour, felt like slipping behind the curtain of one of the most quietly revolutionary companies in cannabis. Because while the industry is full of people trying to be seen, Aaron has been busy actually changing it. He didn’t build Wyld to flip it or feed his ego. He built it to prove that you can scale with the precision of Anheuser-Busch while holding the soul and ethics of Patagonia.
Launched by a tiny crew of three friends in Oregon, Wyld is now THE national edibles powerhouse with:
- 1100 employees all paid well and given real benefits
- 21 facilities across 16 markets
- 80% saturation across North America
- Profitable within the first 6 months of operating
And they did it without outsourcing or cutting corners. Aaron controls it all, from quality, production, and even distribution, because integrity can’t be subcontracted. Wyld runs on 100% renewable energy. It funnels serious money into BIPOC-owned businesses, environmental protections, and nonprofits. It’s now even offering distribution to other brands, while Aaron’s new venture, Good Tide, has already broken into the top 5 edibles brands in the U.S.
No one else is doing what Aaron is doing. And he’s doing it all while sidestepping the spotlight.
This is The Hotbox with Aaron Morris.
The Hotbox Q&A: 5 Questions with Aaron Morris
The Weight of Control
While Wyld has scaled quickly, you’ve committed to being hands-on in almost all of the variables – from facilities to van fleets, and over a thousand Wyld employees. What can you tell us about building Wyld with minimal outside input? What were the darkest moments of that gamble? When lawsuits, regulations, or sheer exhaustion hit, did you ever think: “Maybe we should just license this and make it easier,” and what kept you from folding?
Well, our first goal was just to become the biggest edible brand in Oregon, so in the early days we never really gave much thought to scaling or “national expansion.” So, part of it is not having lofty investor expectations and just focusing on control. The more control we had, the greater ability we had to do things the way we wanted to and on our timelines.
The dark moments were from working the team far too much. We were very underpaid and overworked in the early days. Since we were growing so fast without traditional investors, we simply could not afford more management hires to oversee expansion, so we had to do it with the Oregon team.
Taking on California with a shoestring budget of ~150k for buildout, inventory, and van purchases put a lot of strain on all of us. Also, when we got there, we quickly learned that our success in Oregon mattered very little to anyone in California, so from a sales perspective, we literally were starting over in the world’s largest cannabis market. I’m sure there are plenty of paths that would have been easier, but the flexibility we had because we controlled so many variables allowed us build and scale in our way.
Surviving the Fire
Wyld was profitable within six months, which is a true miracle in cannabis. But no miracle happens without pain. Most brands bleed cash for years and die in silence. What did you get right that no one else seems to? And on the flip side, what were the mistakes, the early battles, even the legal scares that almost took you down before Wyld ever got to scale?
I don’t think we did anything that revolutionary; we were just ignorant, and we refused to listen to any consultants and bankers. I think there are two things that stick out, though.
The first being that we were solely focused on quality, consistency, execution, and not market share – the irony being that the market share quickly followed. The second thing was our stubbornness to only self-distribute, which was a very expensive gamble, but allowed us to maintain control of customer service and execution on the sales side. To this day, there are services that we could use that are cheaper than doing distribution ourselves, and yet we refuse to entertain any of the conversations.
A major early battle for us was that we almost lost the entire business from the medical to recreational switch in Oregon due to our previous business partners suing the company and stealing all our inventory. We literally relaunched Wyld onto the recreational market with less than $1,000 in our bank and over $400,000 in legal debt (with no income to pay it off).
The other tough reality that gets lost in the “success story” is that in order to maintain cash flow without raising capital via equity investments, we had to consistently dwindle our inventory in Oregon in order to free up cash for other states’ inventory. There were some months that I told the team we had to reduce the finished good inventory by 75% just to pay for a build-out. This consistently caused out-of-stock issues with certain SKUs and forced us to be understaffed in Oregon. This meant late-night packaging shifts for all of us almost every single night, trying to get the next day’s orders fulfilled. We were living on the edge of cash flow, and one month of down sales would have likely caused the company to go out of business as there was literally no parachute or backup plan.
Scaling Without Selling Your Soul
A lot of brands hang “sustainable” signs while quietly torching the planet. You’ve pushed Wyld to run on 100% renewable energy, while growing faster than almost anyone. How do you make massive scale and real environmental ethics coexist? Where do the costs come from, and what’s your answer to the people who say “you can’t be both big and ethical” in this system?
Before Wyld made a single dollar, the internal goal was to “build the Patagonia of Cannabis.” That being said, when you are tiny, you have to go through a lot of hypocritical times to scale your business. It was necessary, though, because without growth, our ability to drive meaningful change would have always been limited.
So, the first goal was to reach a scale where we could actually make a real impact in the world. The reality of our business is that we are a manufacturing and distribution business with a large carbon footprint, so we decided we had to deal with it. To be honest, there are a lot of ways to cheat around carbon credits, but if you do it authentically and transparently, it is expensive. You just have to accept that and budget for it. We’ve spent millions of dollars on our sustainable packaging initiatives, carbon credits, tree planting, and many others, but it’s essentially built into our operating costs.
I think it’s possible for every company, but I think larger businesses have zero excuses– you just must be willing to redefine business goals to include outcomes beyond profit. Yes, it costs more to offset carbon and pay living wages, but those outcomes match our values more than money in the bank.
Fighting Late-Stage Capitalism from the Inside
You’ve said and shown that you want Wyld to be a weapon against the worst parts of capitalism. The wealth hoarding. The exploitation. The strip-mining of culture, people, and the planet. How can cannabis be the antidote? What’s your vision of how our industry could actually shift power, redistribute wealth, and protect marginalized communities, and what do owners like you have to risk to make that real?
This might be an unpopular opinion, as the cannabis industry has become an echo chamber of “being different,” but we are in the Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) space, and I don’t know if cannabis can be the antidote. At the end of the day, most consumers don’t change their purchasing decisions for moral reasons.
Deep down, I know little ol’ Wyld can’t change the world on its own, but I do think our industry is in its infancy. It hasn’t been taken over by large corporations yet, so I believe we have a golden opportunity to create a case study to prove that you can make money and do good. American Capitalism has a love for the dollar, and its history is riddled with exploitation, and too many folks believe you can make money or do good for the planet. We are on a mission to prove that you can be profitable and do good. So many people are stuck with receiving a living wage working for a company they don’t align with because the alternative is often a starvation wage. There are exceptions, and my two hero companies are Dr. Bronner’s and Patagonia. The world needs multibillion-dollar revenue companies that hold values as deeply as they do. I
I firmly believe that the world is changing and companies that don’t only focus on profitability for the 1% will eventually become the most valuable companies in the world. So even if you are only after “shareholder value,” I believe this is the path forward. The world just needs to see it done so it can become the baseline expectation. At the end of the day, we can complain about Capitalism – and I could rant for days about my issues with it – but for now, it’s the system we’re in. The only way out is by either transforming it from within or by revolution, and we’re running the route of trying to change it from within. Wyld is still building its future to try to prove that you can have “Anheuser Busch meets Patagonia,” – i.e., be the largest company within your space, be profitable, and weaponize it for good.
The Future Is Fragile
Federal legalization is looming. The market is oversaturated. Big capital is circling like vultures. Meanwhile, political backlash against progressive values is intensifying, including another round of backlash from the current administration. What’s the future of this industry look like to you? What’s your biggest fear, and what’s your plan to keep Wyld mission-pure while going even bigger?
My fear for the cannabis industry is if there is no regulatory relief, then many of the early movers are going to be forced to consolidate or go out of business. It is a brutally difficult space for regulated operators to run a business in. Operating anything in regulated cannabis is 10x harder than any other business, and my worry is that most of the companies that went through all the pain won’t survive to hold on to the market that they helped build.
As far as Wyld goes, we’ll keep doing it our way. We’ll continue to be challengers, set standards higher, and see how far we can take it. We have a lot of strength in our organization and mission to draw from – it’s exciting to look ahead and imagine what we can do.
Aaron Morris didn’t just build an empire; he built the blueprint for the entire cannabis industry. In a space still crawling with paper tigers and hollow brands, Wyld stands as proof that good people can win big without selling their souls. He may never chase cameras or headlines. He may never want the spotlight. But if you care about the future of this industry, you should know his name. Because while the rest are shouting, Aaron is quietly building the world we actually want to live in.
