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Major Bloom
+20%
Year over year growth, comparable period
$5,000+
Raised through the book launch campaign
8
Behavioural segments replacing one audience
2
Missions served by one discipline
The Challenge
A growing customer base without a relationship strategy
Major Bloom is a Black-owned, Economic Empowerment cannabis company rooted in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its business brings together cannabis retail, original products, community advocacy, and a commitment to repairing the harms caused by cannabis prohibition.
It had already built a distinctive presence in the Massachusetts market. Its customer database, loyalty programme, retail activity and community engagement created real opportunities for long term growth.
The existing customer data offered considerably more potential than the email and loyalty programme was capturing.
One list, many audiences
First time customers. Regular shoppers. Loyal advocates. Lapsed customers. Promotion responsive buyers. Product category enthusiasts. Members of the wider community who had never bought anything at all.
Every one of them was receiving the same message.
The Strategic Question
How do you increase customer value without reducing every relationship to a promotion?
Cannabis retail marketing runs on discounts, drops and urgency. That drives short term traffic. It does not create loyalty, and over time it trains an audience to wait for the next offer rather than to value the brand.
Major Bloom needed a CRM strategy that could support commercial performance while preserving the culture, personality and social purpose that distinguish it. So we approached the loyalty programme as a relationship system rather than a mailing list.
Every campaign had to answer three questions
01
Who is receiving this message?
02
What is their current relationship with Major Bloom?
03
What is the most relevant action for them to take next?
What We Did
Rebuilt the CRM around audience behaviour
Rather than treating the database as one general audience, we developed a segmentation structure based on customer behaviour, engagement, loyalty and relationship stage. That allowed Major Bloom to communicate differently with each group.
The eight segments
01
New customers
Need guidance and a reason to return.
02
Repeat customers
Need continued relevance.
03
Loyalty members
Should feel recognised, not just rewarded.
04
Highly engaged customers
The most active voices in the community.
05
Lapsed customers
Need a compelling reason to reengage.
06
Promotion responsive customers
Offers stay direct, just no longer universal.
07
Product focused audiences
Grouped by the categories they care about.
08
Active and inactive subscribers
Split by recent engagement with email.
Designed around the customer journey
A new customer needs guidance and a reason to return. A repeat customer needs continued relevance. A loyal customer should feel recognised. A lapsed customer needs a compelling reason to reengage. We aligned messaging to those relationship stages and moved the programme past one size fits all promotion.
Connected to commercial objectives
Campaigns were planned around defined customer actions rather than email volume. Each communication carried a clearer purpose, a defined audience, a message hierarchy and an intended next step. Promotions stayed direct. They simply stopped being the whole strategy.
Made repeatable
Optimisation was treated as an ongoing process, not a one time correction. We evaluated performance across audience, offer, content, timing and intended action, and fed those insights into the next set of communications so every campaign strengthened the one after it.
The Result
20% year over year growth
+20%
year over year growth on the comparable period
The comparison is like for like against the equivalent period twelve months earlier, so seasonality is held constant rather than flattering the figure. The mechanism behind it is not complicated, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the part most CRM programmes never complete.
Better segmentation
→
More relevant messaging
→
Stronger customer action
→
Measurable business growth
The CRM stopped being a distribution channel.
Before this work, the loyalty database was a place to send things from. After it, the same database was an instrument for deciding what to send, to whom, and why. Major Bloom did not need new customers to grow 20%. It needed to organise what it already knew about the ones it had.
Extending The Strategy
From cannabis retail to a founder led mission
The partnership later expanded beyond Major Bloom’s retail communications to support founder Ulysses J. Youngblood and the launch of his debut book, Playing Your Position: Help Children Stay Whole, ahead of its April 2027 release.
The book presents a father’s playbook for protecting children when adult conflict, false narratives and slow family court systems place childhood at risk. It is not about making fathers heroes or mothers villains. It is not about choosing sides.
“When the child is at the center, every adult has a position to play.”
A different message, the same discipline
House of Rubi developed and managed the book launch email campaign, translating a deeply personal and socially important subject into communications that could build trust, mobilise supporters and inspire meaningful action.
Selling a book about custody and childhood has almost nothing in common with selling cannabis. What carried across was not the message. It was the method.
Understand the audience. Establish the emotional and practical stakes. Communicate with clarity. Create a credible reason to act rather than an urgent one. Guide supporters toward one defined action, never several competing ones.
$5,000+
raised through the book launch email campaign
Watch The Series
The conversation behind the book
Ulysses in his own words, in the Playing Your Position video series on the Major Bloom YouTube channel.
Episode 01 · 18 min
Why I Wrote This Book
Episode 02 · 26 min
Fatherhood: What Does It Mean to Put the Child First?
One Strategy, Two Forms Of Impact
The objectives differed. The principle did not.
For Major Bloom
Stronger CRM meant turning customer information into more relevant communication, deeper loyalty and measurable commercial growth. A retail programme that had been sending to everyone began speaking to someone.
For the book launch
It meant using email to mobilise an audience around a personal and socially meaningful mission, where the measure of success was not repeat purchase but whether people were moved enough to act at all.
Understand who is listening. Communicate with purpose. Make every message accountable to an outcome.
Final Results
| Outcome | Result |
|---|---|
| Comparable period growth following CRM optimisation | +20% year over year |
| Funds raised through the book launch email campaign | $5,000+ |
| Customer communication | Segmented by behaviour, engagement and relationship stage |
| Strategic scope | Retail loyalty, retention, founder led advocacy |
The work was not about sending more messages.
It was about creating a system in which every message had a defined audience, a strategic purpose and a measurable next step. That is the value of intentional communication. It does not merely reach an audience. It gives people a reason to act.
Find Major Bloom
The Full Case Study
Read the complete breakdown
Seven pages covering the segmentation architecture, the customer journey design, the growth result, and how the same discipline carried into a founder led book launch.
View the case study (PDF)
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