A multi-state cannabis dispensary chain rebuilt headless — Lighthouse 90+, state-aware browsing, organic-search performance restored.
Sunnyside (Cresco Labs' retail brand) operates dispensaries across multiple US states selling recreational and medical cannabis. The category is the hardest e-commerce environment in retail right now: no SEM, no Facebook ads, no Google Shopping, state-by-state product compliance differs, age verification is non-negotiable, and your only customer acquisition channel that actually works is organic SEO — which is only as fast as your site is.
The previous WordPress monolith couldn't handle the multi-state catalog at the speed organic-search rankings demanded. Lighthouse mobile scores in the 30s killed the SEO that this category leans on hardest. Headless was the only path: Prismic CMS for the editorial layer (location pages, education content, brand stories) and Next.js / Vercel for the marketing front-end. The catalog stays connected to dispensary POS / inventory systems but doesn't block the marketing site's performance.
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State-aware everything
In Figma we designed the entire IA around the truth of how cannabis customers actually shop — by state, by physical-dispensary proximity, by what's legal where they live. A Massachusetts visitor sees the Massachusetts catalog. An Illinois visitor sees Illinois. The locator drives the journey, not aspirational lifestyle content that doesn't convert in this category anyway.
Lighthouse mobile back into the 90s — the organic-search performance bottleneck removed. State-aware catalog browsing live. Marketing team publishes location-page content through Prismic without touching POS or inventory systems. The decoupled architecture makes future state expansion a content-publication task, not an engineering project.
