When Laniakea Evans applied for her first dispensary job, her references were anonymous. The farmers she had worked for knew her work ethic and cannabis knowledge. They were willing to write letters saying so. Putting their names on those letters was another matter.
Looking back, she laughed about submitting that application. As someone who now hires and manages employees, she knows how unusual it would look to receive a résumé supported by references who wouldn’t identify themselves.
She got the job.
That was in 2016, more than a decade after she started trimming cannabis to make extra money as a single mother. Today, Evans is the co-owner, general manager, and buyer at 365 Recreational dispensary in Santa Rosa.
In our Respect My Region Podcast conversation with Laniakea we followed that progression from trimming for friends and farmers to helping run a dispensary. Along the way, she explained why she briefly walked away from regulated retail, what brought her to 365, and how she has built the store around commitments she wanted to see more of in cannabis.
A Single Mom With a Pair of Trimming Scissors
Evans’ cannabis career began more than 20 years ago, when her children were young and she needed additional income. Friends and farmers gave her trimming work. She remembers sitting among experienced trimmers, holding her scissors, and wondering whether she was doing it correctly.
Other people noticed her output before she fully understood it herself. By her account, she averaged a few pounds a day.
The work helped her support her children, and it led to more opportunities. Farmers connected her with other farmers. Trimming expanded into quality control, checking other people’s work, and helping in cultivation rooms and fields.
One memory came back during our closing questions: walking into a chicken coop with about 20 other trimmers and being told to inspect everyone’s work. She still felt new. Many of the people in the room were older and more experienced. Now she was responsible for telling them when their work needed improvement.
She did it, including pointing out flower that still had too much leaf attached. Long before she became a dispensary owner, Evans was learning to hold people accountable for the product leaving their hands.
Anonymous References and a First Dispensary Job
By 2016, Evans had experience trimming, making products, and selling to dispensaries. With California moving toward adult-use legalization, she decided to try working inside a store.
That meant translating years of legacy-market experience into a job application.
Her solution was to ask the farmers she worked with for those anonymous reference letters. They described her knowledge and the kind of employee she had been, even if they couldn’t provide a conventional employment reference.
She started as a budtender. Before the store opened, she said, she had already received a promotion. Another followed within a month, and she moved into operations management.
Her background also included making cannabis products for medical patients. A family experience gave that work a more personal purpose. Experience that shaped what she wanted from a career in cannabis. Helping people access products and understand their options became central to the work.
Why She Stepped Away Before Coming to 365
Her move into regulated retail wasn’t a straight climb toward ownership. Around 2018, Evans took a break. She was frustrated with the direction of the market, particularly what she saw as a loss of compassion.
She had entered retail hoping to reach more people. The business she wanted to help build needed to leave room for the patients and consumers who had motivated her earlier work.
Ownership elsewhere wasn’t something she had been actively pursuing. When we asked whether she had considered partnering with other dispensary groups, she said her interest had been specific to 365. She joined the company in 2020.
Shelf Space Comes With a Community Commitment
Evans asks vendors to support nonprofits as part of their relationship with the store. Product quality, customer demand, and sales performance still have to work. Community participation is another expectation she brings into those conversations, including agreements with vendors about supporting the organizations connected to 365.
During the interview, she discussed support for an animal rescue and sanctuary, The Living Room’s work with women and children experiencing homelessness, and Sweetleaf Collective’s cannabis compassion efforts.
The contributions take different forms: money, supplies, wish-list purchases, and connections between cannabis brands and compassion programs. For Evans, those relationships also address the stigma that still follows the industry. She shared how her own mother had worried about the store, its customers, and her safety before visiting and seeing the business herself.
Her response has been to make the dispensary’s participation in the surrounding community visible and practical.
That work connects directly to why she returned to retail. The compassion she wanted to preserve has become something she expects business partners to participate in.
Some of Her Staff Have Worked With Her Since 2016
When we asked what makes the customer experience at 365 different, Evans pointed to how long employees have stayed. Some staff members have worked with her since her first dispensary job in 2016. Others followed her from later positions. She said the store has retained employees from its opening and experiences limited turnover.
Customers notice.
They return asking for the person who helped them previously. Some bring food or Christmas presents for budtenders. Others check in after hearing an employee had a difficult day.
Those are specific relationships built through repeated visits. Customers can return to someone who remembers the previous conversation, including what they tried and what they thought of it.
Evans also credited employees with much of the store’s presence around town. While she attends chamber mixers and business events, staff members build their own connections throughout the community.
She was clear that she couldn’t do the work alone.
Evans described years spent introducing the store to hotels, motels, vacation rentals, and resorts. Her local involvement has also included serving on the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber’s board.
Santa Rosa brings together longtime cannabis consumers and visitors traveling through wine country, the coast, and the redwoods. Building relationships with hospitality businesses gives their employees somewhere to direct guests who ask about cannabis.
She has taken a similarly direct approach to reaching older adults, participating in retirement-community wellness fairs and answering questions in person.
Inside the store, that range of customers is apparent. Some know the local farms and arrive with a purchase already decided. Some of the more older customers are exploring cannabis for the first time whereas younger adult shoppers may arrive asking about a vape they discovered on Instagram.
Buying for all of them requires Evans to look beyond her own preferences.
Staff members try products and provide feedback before purchasing decisions. The team discusses customer requests. Available space limits how many brands the store can accommodate, so each addition needs a reason to be there.
A Buyer Who Checks the Aging Report Every Week
Evans’ expectations continue after a product arrives. For most inventory, she targets a 30-day sell-through. She allows more flexibility for slower-moving categories such as CBD products and topicals, but she reviews inventory and aging reports every weekend.
When products approach that threshold, she wants to know what the brand will do to help. Promises of a discount at 60 days or a credit at 90 days don’t answer her immediate concern: inventory is occupying space and tying up money now.
365 Recreational wants vendors in the store, engaging customers, and helping products move. Social media activity matters to her when a brand can connect it to results for the retailer.
Her buying standards also leave room for small farms.
During our conversation, she highlighted Redwood Roots’ identification of farms on product labels and spoke warmly about family operators who grow, package, and deliver their own cannabis. One example included deliveries arriving with fresh vegetables and homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. She remembered the people, their work, and what they brought through the door.
There was plenty of cannabis talk, too.
Evans named Forbidden Fruit, Northern Lights, ATF, Mimosa, and Jack among her favorite strains. She discussed capsules as a category she wants consumers to understand better and described how her team asks questions before recommending a product.
But the strongest thread through the episode was her own history.
She began trimming because her family needed money. She earned more responsibility, found a way to present legacy experience to a retail employer, and advanced into management.
Evans stepped away when the work stopped aligning with her priorities, then found an ownership opportunity at 365. Now those priorities show up in vendor expectations, longstanding staff relationships, nonprofit support, and the time she spends introducing the business around Santa Rosa.
Watch the full RMR interview with Laniakea Evans of 365 Recreational for her account of that journey, the products she enjoys, and what she expects from the brands on her shelves.
Cannabis is intended for adults 21+ where legal. Follow local laws and consume responsibly.
Disclosure: This article accompanies a Respect My Region Podcast episode sponsored by Treez.
When Laniakea Evans applied for her first dispensary job, her references were anonymous.
The farmers she had worked for knew her work ethic and cannabis knowledge. They were willing to write letters saying so. Putting their names on those letters was another matter.
Looking back, she laughed about submitting that application. As someone who now hires and manages employees, she knows how unusual it would look to receive a résumé supported by references who wouldn’t identify themselves.
She got the job.
That was in 2016, more than a decade after she started trimming cannabis to make extra money as a single mother. Today, Evans is the co-owner, general manager, and buyer at 365 Recreational in Santa Rosa.
In our Respect My Region Podcast conversation with Laniakea, we followed that progression from trimming for friends and farmers to helping run a dispensary. Along the way, she explained why she briefly walked away from regulated retail, what brought her to 365, and how she has built the store around commitments she wanted to see more of in cannabis.
A Single Mom With a Pair of Trimming Scissors
Evans’ cannabis career began more than 20 years ago, when her children were young and she needed additional income.
Friends and farmers gave her trimming work. She remembers sitting among experienced trimmers, holding her scissors, and wondering whether she was doing it correctly.
Other people noticed her output before she fully understood it herself. By her account, she averaged roughly five pounds a day.
The work helped her support her children, and it led to more opportunities. Farmers connected her with other farmers. Trimming expanded into quality control, checking other people’s work, and helping in cultivation rooms and fields.
One memory came back during our closing questions: walking into a chicken coop with about 20 other trimmers and being told to inspect everyone’s work.
She still felt new. Many of the people in the room were older and more experienced. Now she was responsible for telling them when their work needed improvement.
She did it, including pointing out flower that still had too much leaf attached.
Long before she became a dispensary owner, Evans was learning to hold people accountable for the product leaving their hands.
Anonymous References and a First Dispensary Job
By 2016, Evans had experience trimming, making products, and selling to dispensaries. With California moving toward adult-use legalization, she decided to try working inside a store.
That meant translating years of legacy-market experience into a job application.
Her solution was to ask the farmers she worked with for those anonymous reference letters. They described her knowledge and the kind of employee she had been, even if they couldn’t provide a conventional employment reference.
She started as a budtender. Before the store opened, she said, she had already received a promotion. Another followed within a month, and she moved into operations management.
Her background also included making cannabis products for medical patients. A family experience gave that work a more personal purpose.
Evans described preparing cannabis butter for a relative with cancer and driving two hours each way to deliver it. Her relative eventually died, but she remembers believing those preparations helped make some of their remaining family time more comfortable.
That experience shaped what she wanted from a career in cannabis. Helping people access products and understand their options became central to the work.
Her move into regulated retail wasn’t a straight climb toward ownership.
Around 2018, Evans took a break. She was frustrated with the direction of the market, particularly what she saw as a loss of compassion.
She had entered retail hoping to reach more people. The business she wanted to help build needed to leave room for the patients and consumers who had motivated her earlier work.
Ownership elsewhere wasn’t something she had been actively pursuing. When we asked whether she had considered partnering with other dispensary groups, she said her interest had been specific to 365.
She joined 365 Recreational in 2020. Asked how long it took to go from her first retail position to the ownership opportunity, she put it at approximately four and a half years.
The more revealing answer came when we asked what she would change about her early years in leadership.
“I didn’t fight for me more,” she said.
She wished she had advocated more firmly for what she believed the business should do. At 365, those beliefs now influence which brands earn shelf space and what she expects from them afterward.
Shelf Space at 365 Recreational Dispensary in Santa Rosa Comes With a Community Commitment
Evans asks vendors to support nonprofits as part of their relationship with the store. Product quality, customer demand, and sales performance still have to work. Community participation is another expectation she brings into those conversations, including agreements with vendors about supporting the organizations connected to 365.
During the interview, she discussed support for an animal rescue and sanctuary, The Living Room’s work with women and children experiencing homelessness, and Sweetleaf Collective’s cannabis compassion efforts.
The contributions take different forms: money, supplies, wish-list purchases, and connections between cannabis brands and compassion programs.
For Evans, those relationships also address the stigma that still follows the industry. She shared how her own mother had worried about the store, its customers, and her safety before visiting and seeing the business herself.
Her response has been to make the dispensary’s participation in the surrounding community visible and practical.
That work connects directly to why she returned to retail. The compassion she wanted to preserve has become something she expects business partners to participate in.
Some of Her Staff Have Worked With Her Since 2016
When we asked what makes the customer experience at 365 different, Evans pointed to how long employees have stayed. Some staff members have worked with her since her first dispensary job in 2016. Others followed her from later positions. She said the store has retained employees from its opening and experiences limited turnover.
Customers notice.
They return asking for the person who helped them previously. Some bring food or Christmas presents for budtenders. Others check in after hearing an employee had a difficult day.
Those are specific relationships built through repeated visits. Customers can return to someone who remembers the previous conversation, including what they tried and what they thought of it.
Evans also credited employees with much of the store’s presence around town. While she attends chamber mixers and business events, staff members build their own connections throughout the community.
She was clear that she couldn’t do the work alone.
Building 365 Recreational’s Place in Santa Rosa
Evans described years spent introducing the store to hotels, motels, vacation rentals, and resorts. Her local involvement has also included serving on the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber’s board.
Santa Rosa brings together longtime cannabis consumers and visitors traveling through wine country, the coast, and the redwoods. Building relationships with hospitality businesses gives their employees somewhere to direct guests who ask about cannabis.
She has taken a similarly direct approach to reaching older adults, participating in retirement-community wellness fairs and answering questions in person.
Inside the store, that range of customers is apparent. Some know the local farms and arrive with a purchase already decided. Some older customers are exploring cannabis for the first time. Younger adult shoppers may arrive asking about a vape they discovered on Instagram.
Buying for all of them requires Evans to look beyond her own preferences.
Staff members try products and provide feedback before purchasing decisions. The team discusses customer requests. Available space limits how many brands the store can accommodate, so each addition needs a reason to be there.
A Buyer Who Checks the Aging Report Every Week
Evans’ expectations continue after a product arrives. For most inventory, she targets a 30-day sell-through. She allows more flexibility for slower-moving categories such as CBD products and topicals, but she reviews inventory and aging reports every weekend.
When products approach that threshold, she wants to know what the brand will do to help.
Promises of a discount at 60 days or a credit at 90 days don’t answer her immediate concern: inventory is occupying space and tying up money now.
She wants vendors in the store, engaging customers and helping products move. Social media activity matters to her when a brand can connect it to results for the retailer.
Her buying standards also leave room for small farms. During our conversation, she highlighted Redwood Roots’ identification of farms on product labels and spoke warmly about family operators who grow, package, and deliver their own cannabis.
One example included deliveries arriving with fresh vegetables and homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. She remembered the people, their work, and what they brought through the door.
Evans also named Forbidden Fruit, Northern Lights, ATF, Mimosa, and Jack among her favorite strains.
She discussed capsules as a category she wants consumers to understand better and described how her team asks questions before recommending a product.
But the strongest thread through the episode was her own history.
Now her priorities show up in vendor expectations, longstanding staff relationships, nonprofit support, and the time she spends introducing the business around Santa Rosa.
Watch the full RMR interview with Laniakea Evans of 365 Recreational for her account of that journey, the products she enjoys, and what she expects from the brands on her shelves.
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Cannabis is intended for adults 21+ where legal. Follow local laws and consume responsibly.
