There are cannabis conferences you attend because you should, and there are cannabis conferences you attend because you want to. Revelry is emphatically the latter, and its fall edition — Buyers’ Club Fall — takes over Pier 36 in Manhattan tomorrow, Friday, September 18. The event caps On The Revel’s tenth anniversary year, a decade spanning the grassroots gatherings that predated New York’s legal market and the curated trade shows that now define it. I was at the Manhattan edition last year and at the spring show in Hudson, and I have been counting down to this one.
Somebody at On The Revel picked exactly the right word. “Revelry” is not a name a conference usually earns, but this one does. The festivity is unmistakable the moment you walk in: aisles full of actual conversation, introductions happening in every direction, a room that feels less like a trade floor and more like the industry throwing itself a party that happens to generate a serious chunk of the year’s deal flow. You leave having met people you meant to meet, plus a half dozen you did not know you needed to. Lulu Tsui, On The Revel’s co-founder and chief experience officer, has taken to calling Buyers’ Club “Industry Abundance Day,” and having stood in that room, I can tell you the phrase is doing honest work.
The Hudson show this spring is what sold me on the format for good. Basilica Hudson is a cavernous, beautiful space, and On The Revel filled it: 2,800 attendees, 250-plus brands across 180 booths and sponsorships, and 562 licensed retail stores represented. That last number is the one that should stop you. It works out to roughly 85% of New York’s 663 active retailers, gathered in one room on a single day. No other event in this state concentrates the buy side like that. If you sell into New York dispensaries and you were not in Hudson, your competitors were, and they spent the day standing in front of your accounts.
That density is a direct product of how the show is built, and the construction is the part I find genuinely clever. At most conferences the booths belong to service providers, and the day turns into a sequence of sales pitches that may or may not be properly aimed at you. Revelry inverts it. The booths belong to the brands, and the people walking the floor are the licensed retailers those brands already supply or very much want to. So the brands are not prospecting so much as hosting — taking care of the buyers who keep them on shelves and courting the ones they hope to land. When the exhibitor’s job is to be a good host rather than to close a cold pitch, the hospitality is real and the whole tenor of the day changes. The posturing drops away and the room relaxes into something closer to a reunion than a sales call.
Business still gets done, plenty of it, the way it actually gets done in this industry: between people who like each other.
The programming has grown to match the crowd. Buyers’ Club Fall continues the Micro Business Showcase that debuted in Hudson, spotlighting the smaller licensees working with distinctive genetics and a real connection to the communities they come from. Peter Mercado-Reyes, On The Revel’s chief insights officer, described the mutual respect in that corner of the Hudson floor as “real recognizes real,” which is about right: buyers were not just discovering products there, they were meeting founders. If New York’s market is going to stay as culturally distinct as everyone keeps hoping it will, the craft tier needs rooms like this one.
None of this is happening against an easy backdrop, and to On The Revel’s credit, nobody there is pretending otherwise. Co-founder Jacobi Holland has been blunt that the market sentiment right now is tough, with “no sugarcoating that.” What ten years of showing up buys you is a room where people can be honest about the hard parts and still leave feeling like they are not carrying them alone. In a market this bruised, that is rarer and more valuable than a good show floor. Pier 36 is one of Manhattan’s best waterfront venues, the whole New York industry will be in it, and it is tomorrow. I will see you there.
