Charlie Fox recently opened the doors for its Times Square dispensary, which is now the largest dispensary in the Northeast.

Green Market Report‘s executive editor, Debra Borchardt, caught up with Charlie Fox Co-Founder James Mallios to discuss the group’s decision to locate a luxury cannabis dispensary in the heart of Times Square and its plans for the future.

(This interview was edited for length clarity.)

GMR: Tell us why you chose this location for Charlie Fox.

James Mallios: Well, there’s half a million people every day that come to Times Square people from all over the world, and we thought there couldn’t be a better location to highlight and bring Charlie Fox to the world.

We come from a background in restaurants and hospitality, and on some level when we designed restaurants, we always designed restaurants that we wanted to go to. Speaking as someone in a demographic of people who are slowly getting used to cannabis, seeing it as a part of their daily lives, we felt that we wanted to create and design a dispensary that felt just as home for them, maybe on Madison Avenue or on the Miracle Mile.

If they came to Charlie Fox, they would feel like, “Oh, this looks just like the stores I buy my bags in or my handbags or my clothes in. So I should feel very comfortable bringing a box of Charlie Fox gummies to my friend’s house when I go over for a holiday dinner.”

We thought that that was something that people were both looking for and important as cannabis continues to move into the mainstream in the way that it should.

GMR: I immediately thought of Hermes with the coloring of the logo and the animal. Hermes is all about the horses. Why Charlie Fox?

Mallios: We should be so lucky to be set in the same sentence as Hermes.

Charlie is a nickname for fox in Great Britain, and we like the name. Honestly, we just like the name. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.

We also like the fact that Charlie is both a male and female name. Keeping with that idea that we wanted a store that would make cannabis feel accessible to all different types of people, we felt having a name that was used for both men and women would be a great way to do that.

GMR: This store is on three floors. Why go so big for a dispensary?

Mallios: The landlord was someone I’d known personally for some time, and I called him and said, “Do you have any locations for a cannabis dispensary?” He said, “I have one location, but it is the location.” He told me it was a four-story building in Times Square.

We figured, well, if you’re going to go big, you might as well go really big, I guess, and hopefully not go home.

GMR: Clearly you made a pretty big investment in this. When do you think you’ll break even on that?

Mallios: When is 280E officially going away?

The truth of the matter is, I think it’s very hard. I don’t know. I like to think very soon obviously, but I think anyone that says they would have a firm handle in doing those numbers probably is not telling the truth. But obviously, we hope fairly quickly.

GMR: A lot of the traffic (in Times Square) is tourist traffic. But you’ve also identified a New York contingent that’s in this area. So can you walk us through those two different types of potential customers?

Mallios: I think as a native New Yorker, I always think, “Who goes to Times Square?” Well, I go to Times Square every day. That’s who goes to Times Square.

Not that I’m the definition of that person, but think about it. You have Barclays, you have Conde Nast, and you have Morgan Stanley. There are so many companies that are headquartered in and around Times Square, and those are native New Yorkers.

I suspect that many of them may live in areas in the suburbs that have essentially blacked out or whatever the term might be, not allowed retail cannabis – like the north shore of Long Island, most of Suffolk, frankly most of Westchester. So any commuter that works in Morgan Stanley and commutes back to Nassau County, which I expect is a fair amount of people, we’d love to have them come in through Charlie Fox on their way home.

GMR: Let’s talk about the three floors.  Can you walk me through those?

Malllios: What we thought a lot about when we designed the floors was grocery stores, because we have a four-story building and we have to activate three floors. So how do we get customers to want to come upstairs to the second floor? How do we utilize the entirety of the rent that we are paying to expand and accentuate the customer experience?

So first we thought about milk in the back of the grocery store. You always put milk in the back of the grocery store, but it’s kind of a weird interaction with customers where you say you can only buy flower upstairs. It didn’t really make much sense.

So leaning on our hospitality background and embracing this concept of: What are the aspects of a luxury store. When I go into a luxury store, I always think of two things as hallmarks. One is seating in a luxury store. Secondly is the ratio of attendees. In other words, salespeople to the number of customers.

So what we also thought, since it’s Times Square, there’d be a heavy amount of people who are just, for lack of a better word, maybe not interested in having a very long conversation about cannabis. Much like in a way, a wine store. You have some people want to come in and talk about first growth in Bordeaux, then you have some people who are like, “Look, I just want to get my bottle of vodka and go home.”

So for us, the first floor, the apothecary, is built for people who want a swift transaction. It’s an educated consumer. They know exactly what they want.

The second floor is where our cannabis is. We built this long marble bar, and our cannabis sommelier will serve people from across the marble bar. They can sit down at the bar stool and have as long or short of conversation as they want about cannabis. We felt that having people be able to sit down and also people are comfortable at bars, it’s a ritual that people understand.

The third floor, hopefully when consumption lounge rules are revealed, will be a mix of a consumption lounge and private event space. In the future, we’d love to see some sort of atelier possible type function.

I think when you’re opening a small business, whatever vision you have in your head of what the customer wants, in three months or six months, the customer tells you what they really want. So the third floor at the moment is designed to be a mix of a consumption lounge and a private event space.