Founder & CEO · CannaReps

Julie Quinn

Co-Creator, Cannabis Sommelier™ · Vancouver, BC

25 years in retail sales. Three Lift Awards. 2,000+ certified professionals. One mission: make cannabis retail a profession.

2,000+

Certified Graduates

200+

Organisations Trained

3×

Lift Award Winner

4.8/5

Google Rating

The Foundation

Before Cannabis: The Sales Career That Built the Framework

Julie Quinn's story doesn't start in cannabis. It starts in Alberta, where she spent 23 years in retail and professional sales, winning President's Club 7 consecutive years — on part-time hours. Her approach was consistent: understand the customer, earn their trust, treat every transaction as a chance to serve rather than sell.

That discipline earned her a place in Apple's inaugural class of certified Apple Experts — the first woman in Canada to hold that designation. When Apple launched the iPhone 4, Julie trained staff across the country and set a service standard that rippled through the entire Canadian organisation. She wasn't teaching people to close. She was teaching them to connect.

It was that skill — translating expertise into human understanding — that would define everything she built next.

The Proof of Concept

Vancouver, 2015: A Struggling Dispensary in a City of 400

When Julie moved to Vancouver in 2015, the city had over 400 dispensaries operating under the MMRU bylaw — a market with no quality standard, no staff training baseline, and no professional identity. She took over one of those struggling stores and rebranded it as Aura Cannabis.

She applied 23 years of world-class retail to the problem. Train the staff. Earn the customer's trust. Make the experience worth coming back for. The results were direct:

14 → 150+

Daily visitors after training overhaul

$90

Average transaction — customers who trusted the recommendation

3×

Consecutive Lift Awards, including Best Dispensary in Western Canada

🏆 Best Dispensary in Western CanadaLift Award — 3 consecutive years

📱 First Female Apple Expert in CanadaiPhone 4 National Launch Trainer

🏅 President's Club × 7Top performer, part-time hours

The Problem No One Had Solved

Every Dispensary Was Selling the Same Way. And It Was Wrong.

Success at Aura surfaced a problem that one store couldn't fix. Julie watched trained, knowledgeable staff sell cannabis the way every dispensary sold it: by THC percentage. Not by terpene profile. Not by cultivar quality. By a single number on a label.

Wine had WSET. Coffee had SCA certifications. Cannabis had nothing — no shared quality language, no professional standard, no pathway for budtenders to build a career rather than just hold a job. The gap was clear. So was what needed to fill it.

In 2018, Julie co-created the Cannabis Sommelier™ program — a quality grading system and certification framework built on sensory perception, chemotype logic, and consultative selling. The goal was to do for cannabis what WSET did for wine: give professionals a shared language, a credible credential, and a reason to be proud of the work.

Why It Matters

Knowledge Is the Most Powerful Tool for Breaking Stigma.

Julie is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee. She understands what it means to carry stigma that has nothing to do with your competence. Cannabis retail workers carry a version of that stigma every day — skilled, knowledgeable professionals treated as if they're doing something disreputable.

CannaReps exists to change that. When a budtender can explain chemotype logic, assess cultivar quality, and recommend products based on what a customer actually needs, something shifts. The work feels professional. The customer feels respected. The transaction becomes a service rather than a sale.

"Knowledge is the most powerful tool for breaking stigma. When you give people the tools to understand cannabis, they don't just become better at their jobs — they feel proud of their work."

— Julie Quinn

How She Teaches

She Doesn't Lecture. She Creates the Conditions for Discovery.

Julie learned to teach at Apple: don't lecture, create discovery. She brings the same principle to cannabis education. Students don't memorise terpene names — they smell them, identify them, and build confidence in their own perception.

Her classes are described as captivating, direct, and accessible. She treats cannabis as a craft and her students as professionals, because that is what they are. Every session is built around the moment she waits for: a student who suddenly realises they know more than they thought they did.