TreeTown cut wholesale order time in half on Superbud

At a glance

Order processing time

Reduced 50%

Weekly time recovered

~2 hours

Active retail buyer accounts

86

Team adoption complaints

Zero

The Company

Vertically integrated, top to bottom

TreeTown Cannabis is a vertically integrated cannabis company based in Michigan. On the wholesale side, TreeTown manufactures and distributes a broad portfolio of products to retail partners across the state. On the retail side, the company operates Bloom City Club, a five-location dispensary chain that also happens to be TreeTown's largest wholesale customer.

That dual identity creates an unusual operational challenge. TreeTown sells to outside retailers and runs as its own central distribution hub at the same time, pushing weekly orders to all five Bloom City Club locations while managing wholesale relationships with dozens of external partners. Any platform they use has to handle both sides of that without creating extra work.

Angie Marshall runs operations. Before cannabis, she spent two decades in technology, including hands-on work helping other software platforms build features for the industry. She knows what good wholesale software looks like, and she knows what it costs when it's built badly.

The Problem

Outgrowing the industry's dominant platform

TreeTown spent more than four years on LeafLink, the dominant wholesale ordering platform in cannabis. For a long time, it was the only real option. For a long time, they made it work.

But "making it work" increasingly meant working around the platform rather than with it. Placing an order meant typing product names into a search bar one at a time, adding them individually, then reorganizing the line items afterward. No way to browse inventory by category. No way to see what was in stock at a glance. No way to add multiple items in a single action.

For Angie, who placed weekly replenishment orders for all five Bloom City Club locations, this came out to roughly four hours every week spent on order entry alone. Not selling. Not strategizing. Just typing product names into a search bar and dragging line items into the right order.

If you've been on LeafLink, you already know the rest of this story.

The longer it went on, you'd think they'd get better, but it seemed like they were almost getting worse. Any of the issues that were there, you just got used to working around because they weren't getting fixed.

Before and after

The Decision

Why Superbud

TreeTown had already been in conversations with Superbud when LeafLink started flip-flopping on pricing structure. After years of loyalty, the trust eroded fast. That accelerated the timeline.

But what sealed the decision wasn't dissatisfaction with LeafLink. It was a fundamentally different approach to how wholesale ordering software should be built. The Superbud team had run wholesale operations themselves. They built around the work, not around the org chart.

TreeTown joined Superbud as one of its earliest alpha partners. That meant co-building alongside the engineering team, reporting issues in real time, and providing direct feedback on how features should function based on real-world operational needs.

So many times you have people who aren't working in the industry, doing the programming. People working on the software but actually having no idea how retail and vendors actually interact. Who's actually using this thing? What kind of information do they need to pull out of it?

The Transition

Nobody pushed back

Platform transitions create anxiety. Teams get comfortable with existing tools, even flawed ones, and retraining staff is the number-one reason companies stay on platforms they've outgrown. Angie expected pushback from her team. She got the opposite.

TreeTown's inventory and fulfillment manager had worked on LeafLink since day one. Change-averse, by Angie's own admission. She was one of the first to start using Superbud, and one of the first to acknowledge that product setup, pricing, and category management were significantly easier.

When a customer called to place an order, reps would write the order down on paper, hang up, and key it into the platform afterward because the old system was too slow to use live. Now they place orders while the customer is still on the line.

Not a phased rollout. Not weeks of training. The team just started using it.

It surprised me how quickly the team actually said, 'Hey, this is better. This is easier to use than what we were using.' Nobody likes change. But I haven't heard any complaints since.

The Results

Two hours back, every week

Half the time on order entry

Angie's weekly replenishment runs dropped from roughly four hours to roughly two. That's over 100 hours per year recovered from a single workflow for a single team member.

Errors caught before submit

On LeafLink, Angie would routinely miss products because the search-based entry made it easy to overlook items that weren't top of mind. With Superbud, she sees a category at a time and verifies by group: here are the eight low-dose gummies, do I need to add these? Yes or no. The double-check is built into the workflow.

Silence on the buyer side

On the buyer side, the loudest signal is silence. TreeTown used to deal with steady buyer confusion: products not displaying correctly, customers unable to find items on the menu, inbound asking whether items were in stock because the interface made it unclear. Since the switch, that noise is gone.

I'm getting back a couple hours of my day every week. Unlike the old platform where I'm typing things into an order and then reorganizing them later, with Superbud I just go through category by category.

Vertical Integration

One platform for both sides of the business

Most wholesale platforms only have to think about external buyers. Superbud also has to function as TreeTown's internal supply chain tool for all five Bloom City Club locations.

Every week, Angie places replenishment orders for all five stores. Each one requires reviewing inventory across the full catalog, identifying what each individual store needs, and building orders that account for location-specific demand. With the recent launch of location-specific pricing, TreeTown can now set global price adjustments, collection-level pricing, and individual product pricing for each Bloom City Club location directly inside the platform. One more spreadsheet workflow eliminated.

The platform serves as TreeTown's internal supply chain system for the retail side and as their external wholesale system for third-party buyers. One interface. One workflow. Both sides of the business.

Steady growth, even through a tough quarter

TreeTown's volume on Superbud has grown every month since launch, even through what Angie describes as the worst quarter the Michigan cannabis industry has seen. The platform currently supports 86 active retail buyer accounts across TreeTown's wholesale network, with adoption continuing to expand as more buyers come online.

Word of Mouth

Selling Superbud at trade shows, unprompted

At a recent Michigan industry event, a competing platform vendor walked up and pitched Angie on their solution. She turned them down, told them she was already on Superbud, and then tried to sell them on switching. That happens more than once now, unprompted.

When pressed on what specifically sets Superbud apart, Angie comes back to the same three answers.

When I go to trade shows, I kind of go in and pitch Superbud on my own. I told them the previous platform is very dated. There's just a lot of manual entry. A lot of time-sucking.

Why It Stuck

What Angie tells other operators

Asked what specifically sets Superbud apart, she keeps coming back to the same three answers.

Key takeaways

For operators considering a platform transition

• TreeTown's team adopted Superbud with zero complaints, despite years of established workflows on LeafLink
• The transition eliminated manual workarounds that had become so routine the team stopped recognizing them as problems
• Reps now place orders during customer calls instead of writing them down and re-keying afterward

For vertically integrated companies

• Internal supply chain ordering and external wholesale relationships live in one platform
• Location-specific pricing replaces multi-location spreadsheet workarounds
• One interface for both sides of the business reduces context-switching across the team