James Kim’s Los Angeles-based cannabis company grew from a scrappy startup in 2017 to a legal unicorn worth $1.5 billion. Allegations of black-market activity and lawsuits be damned—Stiiizy aims to be the Nike of cannabis.
Inside a warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles, next to a strip club, James Kim, the CEO and cofounder of the California-based cannabis brand Stiiizy opens the door to one of his grow rooms, revealing 972 pot plants, thriving three-foot-tall beauties two weeks from harvest.
“This room is all money,” says Kim, who is 37 and has tattoos covering his arms, including a portrait of Ben Franklin and a rose made from a $100 bill.
These days, Stiiizy is bringing in plenty of Benjamins. The company—which was founded in 2017 and grows cannabis, manufacturers vapes, pre-rolls, gummies and flower—has nearly 50 branded dispensaries across California and generates more than $800 million a year in revenue. Stiiizy, which is also California’s biggest cannabis retailer, is the best-selling weed brand in the country, according to sales data firm Headset. A vertically integrated powerhouse that now operates in seven states, one out of every eight cannabis products sold in the United States is a Stiiizy product.
The company, which Forbes estimates to be valued at $1.5 billion, is privately held, secretive and mysterious—out of four original co-founders, only Kim would agree to speak, and he would not confirm the names of his partners. Founded in the gray market days before California legalized recreational marijuana, Stiiizy has also been dogged by lawsuits, rumors of illicit activity (all of which the company denies) and scandals, but none of that has changed the fact that in the $32 billion regulated cannabis industry, Stiiizy is the brand to beat.
“We’re the number-one brand in the nation,” says Kim. “I always tell people, if we’re number one in the nation, we’re number one in the world.”
A floor below the grow room, Kim walks through his production facility where dozens of employees in blue hairnets and facemasks brush mini blunts with a brown liquid and roll them into a half-pound of kief and put them into trays. In another room, a woman uses a machine to fill 100 Stiiizy vape pens at a time—by the end of the day, workers here will make nearly 100,000 of them. Every month, Stiiizy grows 15,000 pounds of weed and produces about $70 million worth (retail sales) of cannabis products in California, not including how much it produces in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and New York, where Stiiizy launched in February and rose to be among the top 10 best-selling brands within a month.
Kim walks out of his warehouse and jumps in the back of his black Cadillac Escalade and his driver takes him a few minutes down the road to Stiiizy’s DTLA headquarters. “We always had dreams of the brand getting big,” says Kim, while Notorious BIG’s “Juicy” plays over the car speakers. “But we didn’t know it would be this big.”
Kim, who sports an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak chronograph on his wrist, grew up humbly in Cerritos, California. He shared a bed with his older sister so his parents, both immigrants from South Korea, could rent out the other bedroom to help make ends meet. His parents sold women’s clothing at the local Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet and starting at six years old, young James was in charge of setting up the tent, manning the cash register and helping his mom set prices for clothes. (His mom taught him her strategy, which was to price each item at double her cost.)
“They put me to work,” he says. “That swap meet was my life.”
It didn’t keep him out of trouble, however. By the time he was 14, Kim was regularly ditching school to skateboard and smoke weed, and eventually, he began selling it. He soon got pinched with a dime bag and was put on probation. At 17, he was arrested for armed robbery. (The charge was later dropped for lack of evidence and his friend, who had actually committed the crime, took the wrap, but not before Kim spent a week in juvenile detention.) He dropped out of high school junior year to work construction, and then at a warehouse. One day, his mom found a pound of marijuana in his room and demanded he come home. She held the weed over the toilet, threatening to flush the whole thing. But Kim convinced her to give it back, saying he owed his source $2,000 for the stash, and could make a few thousand more for himself.
“That’s how I was able to provide my own lunch money or movie money or shoe money,” says Kim. “It wasn’t a scheme to be this high school kingpin.”
With a goal to graduate high school and become a mechanic, Kim began attending a continuation school for troublemakers and kids at risk of dropping out. In 2006, after a graduation party, he came home late at night and turned on the TV. An Army commercial came on. The next morning, he found himself at a recruiting center and eight weeks later, he was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a member of the 101st Airborne division. Within six months, he was holding an M-4 assault rifle in Baghdad, fighting Saddam Hussein’s troops in close combat. Before his tour was over, his best friend was blown up during a week-long fire fight.
“It was like being in a bad dream that you didn’t want to be in,” says Kim, now in his rented penthouse with sweeping views of Downtown LA. “But it kept going for 13 months.”
In 2014, four years after Kim returned home, he started a nicotine vape shop to cash in on the vape craze sweeping the nation. After a year, he closed the store to launch Kilo, a nicotine vape juice brand, with his high school buddy Jonathan Lee. They hit paydirt—Kilo had $6 million in revenue the first year, $12 million the second and $20 million the third. A marketer at heart, Kim grew Kilo’s customer base around the world, selling his products in the United States as well as Greece and Russia.
In 2016, another high school friend Sam Cho, who was working in the medical marijuana space, told him that they should start a weed brand and get ready for California’s recreational market, which was set to launch in 2018. Kim mapped out the brand and came up with the name Stiiizy, blending the skate slang “steeze” and “easy.” He sank his life savings, a couple million dollars, and, along with his nicotine partner Lee, Cho and Tony Huang, who also seeded the company, and Stiiizy was born as a vape brand.
After buying 500 vaporizers from China and THC oil from a California extractor, Stiiizy started selling in the unlicensed days right before California opened its recreational market. Within a year, Stiiizy built a cultivation site, expanded into flower, edibles and pre-rolls, and by August 2019, Stiiizy opened its first store.
“What made Stiiizy different was that they had an established brand even before legalization,” says Daniel Yi, the company’s former chief communications officer. “They had the advantage of huge momentum, and seemingly endless cash reserves.”
Earlier that year, Stiiizy merged with North Star, a northern California-based operator with grows, manufacturing and dispensaries, which was run by a real estate entrepreneur Brian Mitchell. The new company, dubbed the Shryne Group, suddenly had a huge footprint. The company was on a tear, with sales ballooning as the team opened new stores around the state. This year, Stiiizy has a goal to open one new store a month.
“We are on the road to 100 stores,” says Kim.
But with success, came legal troubles and rumors of black-market operations. Stiiizy vapes began showing up in New York’s unlicensed market—at bodegas and smoke shops—and were even spotted south of the border in Mexico City. Cannabis investors and executives who have worked in California’s industry for over a decade say the rumors of Stiiizy diverting products into the illicit market are so pervasive that it has become an “open secret.”
“They are not the best rule followers in the world,” says one California-based cannabis company executive who asked to remain anonymous.
Tak Sato, Stiiizy’s president, strongly denies the allegations and says that the company “100%” does not operate illegally, adding that when Stiiizy products are found in unlicensed stores or on the black market that they are either counterfeits or smuggled from California by people who buy them in licensed dispensaries.
“The risk simply would not make any sense,” says Sato. “If we were actually found to have been doing something like that, it’s just over.”
But even insiders have claimed Stiiizy breaks the law. Jon Avidor, who was CEO of the brand in 2021, filed a lawsuit against the company in September 2023, claiming it had improperly fired him from the board and took shares away he rightfully owned and alleged rampant illegal activity. Stiiizy denied these claims and Avidor voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit before the parties settled.
Then in December 2023, The Los Angeles Times published an investigation that connected cofounder Tony Huang to multiple properties he owned around California that leased spaces to unlicensed dispensaries. Huang denied the allegations but Los Angeles City Attorney fined Huang and other owners of a property tied to illicit marijuana sales $450,000.
In early April, New York cannabis regulators conducted a surprise audit on a Long Island-based cannabis manufacturer that makes products for a range of companies after receiving a tip that Stiiizy and other brands were sourcing cannabis from the black market or grown out of state. Sato says Stiiizy had been gearing up for the February expansion to New York’s licensed market since October 2024 and its New York partner produced much more than it needed, but that it was not breaking any laws. A spokesperson from New York State’s Office of Cannabis Management says that the information collected during the inspection “is currently under review” and will release its findings when the regulatory process is complete.
Kim brushes the allegations off as all part of the “dog-eat-dog” world of legal weed, where margins are thin, regulations are tough, taxes are punitive and competitors spread false rumors. “It’s like the movie Mean Girls,” says Kim. “They’re saying I’m the biggest slut in school. Well, I’m not. And I’m tired of it.”
All of the notoriety has not hurt Stiiizy’s sales. In fact, its outlaw reputation seems to have had the opposite effect. As a legacy brand, the added street cred has burnished the company’s position as the industry’s leader. Stiiizy is for stoners, not soccer moms and the so-called “canna-curious”—for Stiiizy enthusiasts, the company is one of the real ones. While many weed brands have been developed in boardrooms, or by former corporate consultants, and look like something sold at Whole Foods, Stiiizy came of age in the unregulated weed world of Downtown LA, giving the company just the right amount of outlaw attitude.
“I think a lot of people are threatened by us because they don’t understand how we are doing it,” says Kim. “I don’t even know how we’re doing it, but I think I just know the consumer. That’s the missing piece from the corporate guys—they don’t know the consumer.”
With nearly $400 million in sales in California alone last year, Stiiizy controls about 7% of the Golden State’s $5 billion legal cannabis industry.
“They are an insane brand, the consumer passion for them is just mind-blowing,” says Kyle Sherman, the CEO and founder of cannabis dispensary software company Flowhub. “They have executed better than any other brand in the industry.”
Back at his penthouse, Kim sits at a long dining room table. He says when they started Stiiizy, the goal was to build a company that would last a decade, with the hope that it would be around even longer. Now, Stiiizy wants to be the “Nike of weed,” he says, a company known as the go-to brand for all things cannabis.
“My goal now is that Stiiizy will become a lifetime brand,” says Kim. “This is my legacy.”