Meet John Shaughnessy of Bellisimo Botanicals in Wheat Ridge

Today we’d like to introduce you to John Shaughnessy.

John, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My story starts out in Long Island, New York where I’m originally from. In 2015 I graduated from Nassau Community college and began to plan out a way to pursue my passion of working with cannabis in an ever-evolving marketplace. At the time I owned my first small business, (Coreys Crystal Works), based on my middle name “Corey” and the wire wrap jewelry I made. Be it one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a music festival vendor who owned his own small business, I decided to let go of this occupation to pursue something greater. My passion aligns with helping people, and cannabis was the direction I wanted to use to implement that. I was certain this was what I wanted to do in life, and made it a goal to get involved in the industry as soon as I could.

In May of 2015, I made my way across the country to California to follow my dreams with a job offer to be a growers assistant and trimmer for a small collective operating out of the back of the Airside Wellness dispensary in Van Nuys. I learned all of the basics of cultivation with this first collective, but within 8 months I eventually moved on to a different collective based out of Malibu called Malibu Organics with much higher standards and quality.

While I was in California I learned all of the ins and outs of the cannabis industry and prided myself on getting involved in just about every way I could while I had the freedom to do so, since it was expected within time, that the permits and licenses to keep doing these things were going to be implemented soon, and it wasn’t going to be cheap or easy. I got involved in everything from all aspects of cultivation, post-harvest, extractions, infusions, doing sales for collectives as a “vendor” to dispensaries, and a little bit of Cannabis chemistry on the side too. This is the time in my life where I started my second small business Lunar Edibles, that I promoted as a unique up and coming edible chocolate bar brand on the California medical marijuana market.

What set these chocolate bars apart from the competition was that I developed a formulation, that converts over 2.5% of the THC by volume into CBN (Cannabinol), as to produce a custom made entourage effect with 200mg THC and 5mg CBN. The 40 to 1 ratio of these cannabinoids showed their benefits well enough to patients and owners, that within my first 6 months of business I was driving to Marina Del Ray regularly with boxes of 300 chocolate bars for one of my main accounts, Marina Caregivers. Although this didn’t get the recognition I thought it deserved, I’m also the creator of the “Cannanoli”, the first cannabis-infused cannoli available on any market in the world. As my time in California moved forward, more costs came up and without an investor or any side help, that vision began to dwindle away from being a real possibility of making Lunar Edibles a successful business. Eventually, this is where I decided to find more stability and come out to Colorado and grow again until I could start anew.

Growing Cannabis in Colorado was nothing like it was in California. Gigantic corporations were all that were hiring, so I took up a position with one of the big companies out here. It wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be, but context-wise, it was really cool to be working on an operation 40 times the size of where I last worked. In a way I did fulfill that dream, I was growing thousands of pounds of cannabis for the state of Colorado (30% of all of the weed in the state came from our building) and it was really cool to experience that. Sadly, the bigger the corporation, typically means the worker is valued less. After two years being a cultivator with seniority on my team, I was shocked to find out I was being fired for having an asthma attack around a moldy crop where oddly enough, a respirator was not provided to us and that I was a liability to the company. I was in shambles, thousands of miles of driving, years of growing experience all to just lose it from something I had no control over. Luckily at this time, I had the choice to apply for more jobs or consider giving the thought of starting a small business another go. This is where Bellisimo Botanicals came to fruition.

I started Bellisimo Botanicals in January of 2019 with the intention to go full steam ahead on jumping right into the industrial hemp and CBD market. From square one, it seemed to become more and more difficult to get my foot in the door, not by just making the products anywhere but making them legally and compliant with Colorado law which does regulate CBD products. I looked around endlessly at warehouses In Denver, Boulder, and numerous other counties only to find out that all of these landlords were against CBD businesses renting from them and refused to rent to any startups. Another brick wall, I didn’t know what to do.

I found myself searching for grows hiring again out here, losing faith, and then one day I decided to go get a smoothie at my favorite smoothie shop not too far from my home, Twisted Smoothie co. It was a weekday I think, in the middle of the winter, so it seemed a bit quiet. This space was so nice, so welcoming, and so spacious! I had an epiphany, this is the spot! I had to mention I started an LLC called Bellisimo Botanicals and was in need of a compliant space to make the products in. I was dead set on meeting the owner to get a meeting underway. I was to be relentless if I was going to succeed. It took a few times going in to finally get to meet the owner of Twisted Smoothie co, Joshua Hudson, but we finally had our meeting.

Almost two hours into discussing my intentions with their commercial kitchen space, we had a deal! I was no longer unemployed with just an LLC, I had a production site for my new CBD company! We got our commissary agreement filed with the state health department, and I filed for my sales tax permit and food manufacturers registration as Colorado regulates CBD as a food product. I was in business, and two good friends, Michael Lambert, who helped me out to get all of my original labels designed for a product trade, and Matthew Diaz, who took all of the professional photographs I needed of my products, helped me get to where I am today. I’m super grateful to have amazing friends like them. We got our trades underway and that’s when I had labeled CBD products! I followed up with getting all of the different potencies of each product lab-tested, with my certificate of analysis results I was officially ok to sell CBD to the general public.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Along the way, there have been countless obstacles and challenges I had to get to this point. The biggest of which was that I was actually homeless for about six months between California and Colorado after my lease ended in LA in 2016, my roommate went back to New York to pursue his interests and I was left with a choice to find somewhere else to live or save some money to hold me over until I knew what to do. LA isn’t cheap, you’re looking at 3 to $4,000 to secure an apartment there most of the time. I didn’t think it was worth it especially as the edible business needed funding to survive as well.

The other biggest struggle was losing my job Christmas week of 2018, being left to pick up the pieces of a dream occupation that sadly didn’t pay more than a mediocre hourly pay anywhere in the state of Colorado. I needed to find progress, not stagnation in an industry that didn’t have real opportunities at a good-paying career. I decided you know what, I don’t need another weed industry job, I’ve formulated THC products before with wonderful precision, I can do this with CBD derived from hemp without a doubt and without the insane cost of a MIPS (marijuana-infused products) license. It just took some intense planning, and a leap of faith into the idea that I could really pull this off.

Bellisimo Botanicals – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
My company is Bellisimo Botanicals, we make high-end CBD products at an affordable price that everyone can enjoy. We specialize in making products with consistent and reliable results based on standard operating procedures and formulations tested for accuracy of their cannabinoid potency and safety. We are well known for reliable lab-tested products, of which our tincture has been evaluated by the Denver Country Health Departments Public Health Investigations for shelf stability and control of the growth of Clostridium Botulinum spores. People love that we’re making all of our products in house (no white label here!), beating most of the competition’s prices when it comes to CBD products, especially as a product manufacturer people can buy direct from, and a vision that sets our company apart from the rest.

This vision that sets us apart from other companies is that it’s my vision to make the world a better place and to do so by using a portion of the Bellisimo profits to aid in reforestation through the One Tree Planted foundation. With every product sold, Bellisimo Botanicals plants a tree with the one tree planted foundation. We just became an affiliate with them back in September and have already had a few hundred trees planted between California, Colorado, and in Ethiopia! We believe if your company is involved in the CBD industry where so much revenue is coming in, you absolutely should be paying it back to your planet anyway you can.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The proudest moment of my career so far was when I partnered with Twisted Smoothie co. It was not just a place of business or production, it was everything, in a nutshell, I was looking for out of a space to start my company. I’ve heard stories of companies starting out in the corner of a kitchen space, with one or two tables to work with, and they succeeded just fine. I feel the same way about Bellisimo Botanicals, I don’t need an entire warehouse or giant facility to start this company, I can make this work with the space available here! I got my compliant commercial kitchen space, I found an awesome group of people that I’m surrounded by, and to top it off, this was my first retail location to sell Bellisimo products! So much good came out of this one moment, I don’t think anything else tops it.

Pricing:

• 100mg CBD Roll On lotion – $10
• 1,000mg CBD Drops – $50
• 100mg Topical CBD Salve – $15

Contact Info:

• Address: 5640 W 29th Ave
  Wheat Ridge, CO 80214
• Website: www.bellisimobotanicals.com
• Email: bellisimobotanicals@gmail.com

Image Credit:
John Verwey / @_johnverwey.

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