Billy Cox
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Fla.
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) Carmen Brace is the founder of “Aclara Research company.” The company surveys the popularity of legal cannabis products in their myriad commercial forms.
Sarasota
“I think we’re all called to do something special, and many of us don’t answer the call because of fear,” says Sarasota entrepreneur Carmen Brace. “And I’m an expert, because I pretty much feel fear all the time. But I think we are here to transform obstacles into opportunities.”
At no time was that fear more palpable than 2020, when Brace’s startup, like everything else, was forced to confront the global paralysis of the pandemic.
Heavily dependent upon travel and bringing consumer test groups together to rate new products prior to launch, her self-funded, four-year-old Aclara Research company was at a crossroads. Aclara was riding the crest of the marijuana wave, surveying the popularity of legal cannabis products in their myriad commercial forms.
Deeply immersed in studying consumer trends and preferences in the weed market, Brace and her team decided to go big: “We chose to focus on developing traction with two of the largest global data companies in the world. These partnerships give us not only credibility, but they give us access to companies that invest the most in scalable data products to drive consumer insights.”
Specifically, Aclara linked up last year with two data industry titans, Nielsen Global Media and Ipsos, after developing preference profiles on 30,000 cannabis users across the U.S. They’re now working on a pilot project which will give retailers and other producers precise ideas about what Americans are looking for in medicinal and personal-use marijuana consumables. Scheduled for a 2022 rollout, the model could become an unofficial industry standard for gauging customer demand.
Brace’s brainstorm had so little competition, it caught the eye of Forbes magazine in January, which threw a spotlight onto Aclara. And as word of her coup spread, the part-time Chicago resident has begun thinking even bigger. After all, the article introduced Brace under the novelty-item headline as a “Black Female Founding CEO.”
Historically underrepresented as a demographic niche, Black women who raise more than $1 million in outside investments for their businesses are enjoying an unprecedented growth surge. That’s according to ProjectDiane, a survey that keeps tabs on the fortunes of women of color.
As of August 2020, Black female entrepreneurs who hit the million-dollar mark or more stood at 90, versus 34 in 2018. And that’s an undercount. Moreover, the number of Black women-owned businesses jumped by 50% from 2014 to 2019, according to the study.
Carmen Brace looks to be a permanent member of the club. Consider the prospects:
New Frontier Data, which keeps tabs on marijuana markets, forecasts $41 billion in U.S. cannabis sales, medicinal and personal use, by 2025. Aclara has its sights set on a corner of the action called consumer packaged goods. CPGs are typically brand-name shelf items — think food, beverages, cleaning products — that require routine restocking.
At the checkout counter, scanned items are aggregated and fed into databases purchased by the big food companies, which track buying patterns to tweak existing products and experiment with new ones. Brace spent 20 years in that hyper competitive world, analyzing buying habits for global data companies serving the likes of Campbell’s Soup, Walmart, Kroger and Publix.
“This is what cannabis companies are doing now,” Brace says. “It’s very important. And when I looked around and saw there were no companies in this lane, I knew I had to start this.”
In other words, of that anticipated $41 billion cannabis market, CPG expects to account for 2% of the total revenue. And roughly half of that, Brace says, “will be allocated to point-of-sale data, which will be devoted to consumer insights. So we estimate, by 2025, we’ll be playing in a $400 million market, of which we can capture a significant percentage.”
Brace formed Aclara after her extensive analysis of the cannabis market indicated “it wasn’t just people who wanted to get high, it’s about getting well.” In fact, her polling indicated that 80% of respondents had slashed or eliminated entirely their reliance on alcohol or other pharmaceuticals to mitigate pain. Americans have validated the data by approving legal cannabis as healing alternatives in 36 states.
Furthermore, as businesses everywhere began slumping, weed proved COVID-proof — perhaps even COVID-driven — in 2020. Sales totaled $18 billion, up by 33% from the year before, according to Street Insider.
A member of the Chicago NORML board of directors who also has a seat on Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzger’s Committee on Cannabis and Health, Brace is undaunted by the federal government’s obsolete but so-far intractable classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug with no medicinal value. Short of lawmakers revoking the stigma of federal illegality, she predicts Congress will move to make investment easier by freeing weed from the draconian 280e section of the IRS tax code.
“Full access to banking,” Brace says, “is going to change the game.”
280e is a 40-year-old artifact from President Reagan’s war on drugs, which prohibits businesses that sell Schedule I or II controlled substances from deducting related business expenses, thereby exposing them to fully taxable income. A bid by the U.S. House to remove cannabis from 280e in 2020 failed to advance to the Senate, but the new Democratic majority is promising an overhaul of the nation’s archaic marijuana policies. In February, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described the status quo as “a war on people, and particularly people of color.”
Ending that war, says Brace, is no less a motivator than making money. A 2020 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union of marijuana busts from 2001-2010 revealed this stark fact: Although marijuana usage rates among Blacks and whites were equally proportionate, Blacks were 3.73 times more likely to get arrested for possession.
“I approach my business in a way that allows me to not only treat my cofounders, my clients and my vendors with dignity and respect,” she says. “It’s also about knowing that we are all working together to make the pie bigger for everyone, not only for ourselves and our shareholders, but for the community at large.
“I have a unique responsibility to make sure the lessons that I’ve learned over the years, the experiences I’ve heard about from those who’ve suffered so greatly under legitimized governmental policies that were based on institutionalized racism in the cannabis space, is to make sure I can carry their voices forward.”
Brace, who moved to Sarasota part-time to be with her mother and aunt (both since deceased), initially intended to put her economics degrees from the University of Illinois and Ohio State to work in international agricultural policy with the Peace Corps. Her career trajectory took another direction, but making a difference of scale remained a goal.
“Sometimes, you know where you’re going,” she says, “but the exact path shifts over time.”
Along came the coronavirus. And an obstacle became an opportunity. Maybe her family’s journey through faith prepared her for it.
“My mother’s sister, I guess you could call her a spiritual seeker,” Brace says, “and my own spiritual journey has taken me through so many organized religions, because my mom took my brother and me everywhere. We went to Pentecostal churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientist, and I’m literally, like, a Mormon. My name is in the book of Latter Day Saints. So, yeah, talk about emerging trends of a spiritual nature? She saw things coming.”
Towards the end, Brace says her mother discovered and began practicing some forms of Buddhism, which she embraces today. Brace says that odyssey is at least partially responsible for her ability to detect more accessible emerging trends in the business world and “to see two steps ahead.
“You can have the idea, but you also have to bring it on the land. That’s why, every day, you have to be centered. Because I think we’re here to develop our highest potential as human beings and to help others transform their own lives.”
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
