The first NECANN show should have been a disaster. February in Boston. Seven feet of snow. A venue with frozen steps. A Patriots Super Bowl scheduling scramble. Marc Shepard was outside at 5 a.m., smashing ice off the entrance to a beer hall and wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into.
Then the doors opened.
By 9 a.m., there was a line around the corner. NECANN had to stop selling tickets at the door both days because the response was too big for the room. This was 2015, before adult-use cannabis was legal in Massachusetts and before most East Coast operators had anything resembling an industry to stand on.
I just sort of remember going into the owner of where I worked the next day, and he was sort of my partner in that launch, and I was like, good news, bad news, you saw the event. Good news, I think we’ve got something really good here. Very exciting. Bad news, I’m retiring from the newspaper industry. I’m going to do this. – Marc Shepard
A decade later, Shepard is co-founder and president of NECANN, short for New England Cannabis Conventions, one of the East Coast’s most recognizable cannabis event platforms. The company’s official site says NECANN has been developing cannabis conventions since 2014 with an intentionally local-market approach, including a commitment to donating 10% of exhibit hall space to social equity licensees and advocacy groups.
That local-first philosophy is not just branding. For Shepard, it is the whole damn machine.
From Alt-Weeklies to Weed Weeklies
Before cannabis conventions, Shepard lived in the scrappy, ink-stained world of alternative newspapers. He came up in the orbit of papers like the Boston Phoenix and Providence Phoenix, the kind of progressive alt-weeklies that treated culture, politics, civil rights, and drug …
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Author: Kyle Rosner / High Times
