The European medical cannabis market has been transformed over the last five years, evolving from a fringe, start-up-dominated industry into a thriving international ecosystem breaking into the forefront of the political and social zeitgeist.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK and Germany. Both markets are regional frontrunners, and both are at the top of the list for any operator chasing expansion. Yet, both are on very different paths.
While the UK has seen consistent but steady growth, Germany has seen an explosion in patients, products, and new operators, many of whom have ridden this wave all the way to the bank.
As the conversation turns to German consolidation and retraction, UK medical cannabis clinic Releaf sees an unmissable opportunity.
Tim Kirby, Releaf’s CEO, told Business of Cannabis: “A lot of operators in Germany are drinking their own champagne. It’s very easy to feel successful when there’s huge demand, but that doesn’t mean you’re good at it. If the wind is blowing hard enough, even turkeys can fly.
“We forensically understand the competitive landscape in Germany, the marketing setups of incumbent providers, their SEO authority structures, and quite frankly, they resemble school projects compared to what we’ve built, and that’s not my opinion, I say it objectively not out of any arrogance, its a datapoint, look at how Releaf dominates the digital landscape in the UK.”
Success does not mean world-class execution
Releaf is a relative newcomer in the UK medical cannabis market, having officially ‘opened its virtual doors’ on February 01, 2024.
Despite this, over the last 18 months, the tech-focused clinic has rapidly evolved into one of the country’s largest players, and is now the fastest-growing clinic in the market, serving over 4,000 new patients a month.
Furthermore, it says recruitment is in flight to grow to 10,000 new patients a month over the next six months, while growing the current doctor number from 43 to close to 100.
“In the UK, we had 1.2 million unique visitors to our website in July and August. Our nearest competitor had less than half that, despite spending more than €300,000 a month on marketing. We spent €25,000. The difference is our digital ecosystem,” Kirby explained.
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This digital ecosystem, developed, road-tested, and proven in the UK, is now set to be rolled out in the highly competitive German market.
Last month, Business of Cannabis reported that Releaf had announced the launch of a new global expansion strategy, acquiring Releaf.com to act as its ‘launchpad for global growth’.
At the time, Jon Dunn, Marketing Director at Releaf, said that this site was ‘not just a domain’, but ‘our passport to every market we enter’.
“It gives us instant credibility, makes our brand unforgettable, and ensures patients worldwide know exactly where to find us.”
Releaf is poised to roll out its ecosystem, offering medical cannabis in Germany, having focused on laying the groundwork since June, and is confident in its ability to replicate its success in what is undoubtedly the most exciting market in Europe.
As Peter Zownir, Brand Director at Releaf, commented, “Releaf evolves into an international healthcare company, we are paying 100% attention to the look, feel, and emotional flow of every brand touchpoint. The German website, for example, has been designed far beyond the pseudo-recreational or purely transactional sites that dominate the market. For us, it is not just about functionality; it is about trust, reassurance, and patient experience.”
The team’s experience in e-commerce and marketing is sector agnostic, having built global businesses in both the FinTech and Healthcare verticals.
“Because of the way Germany operates, it’s essentially an e-commerce market, and any e-commerce market is a marketing competition. We’ve got the track record and the data to prove we can win that competition anywhere in the world, again, this is not arrogance, its a matter of record, a data point, we have evidence, success leaves clues” Kirby explained.
“Our user experience will be far superior. The UX will be off the hook. Patients will stay on the website longer, the conversion funnel will perform better, and we’ll rank higher across every search term.”
Kirby continued that it’s not just Releaf’s market-tested platform that gives it the upper hand, but the lack of investment in its specialist area from other operators.
During a recent industry conference in Germany, attended by the biggest and most successful operators in the market, he said that ‘you could sense everyone in the room thought they were doing well, everyone on the stage had a graph that was going up.’
“Could any of them explain how they directly affected it? No one I asked could, it’s the market conditions, the demand, it is certainly not excellent execution and sophisticated go-to-market strategies. Pair huge demand with world-class execution, and a new level of engagement and scale will appear rapidly. Releaf is poised.
“They confuse their results with their performance; they are very different things.
“There’s a real lack of investment in the kind of digital ecosystems that we built in the UK. In Germany, demand is so high that anyone can open a website, put up a questionnaire, and people will find it. But that’s not excellence, it’s opportunism.
“Most German clinics are as suboptimal in their digital execution as the UK operators were before we entered that market. Everyone’s posting on LinkedIn, congratulating themselves on their success — but the truth is, the market did the work for them. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“We’ll absolutely cannibalise a large portion of the market held by clinics that are executing poorly. We’ll take existing volume and the lion’s share of new growth, just as we do in the UK.”
Top five within six months
Its platform, according to Kirby, will also offer benefits over its competitors for both patients and pharmacies, and its ‘patient-centric’ approach will continue to be a cornerstone of its approach.
“We’ll use as many independent reference points as possible to validate the quality and value we deliver — whether that’s patients, pharmacies, or digital feedback forums,” he said. “We always focus on bringing the voice of the patient or customer forward. That’s how we build trust.”
This philosophy, central to its UK success, will extend to both its engagement and brand positioning, prioritising perceived value rather than competing on cost, in a market increasingly hampered by cost compression.
“We’re not trying to buy patients with discounts or free consultations,” he said. “You can shout ‘free consultations’ as loudly as you like into an empty room; no one’s listening. It’s all about value.”
For pharmacies, Releaf says its commercial model is one they are ‘desperate for’ because it works with a ‘single transaction.
The patient doesn’t have to pay the clinic and then wait for the pharmacy to call them up for card details; it all happens in a single step within Releaf’s exclusive global payment gateway partner, Stripe.
Stripe Connect is a feature in Stripe’s platform that handles fund disbursement between the pharmacy and clinic in the background.
This is unique to Releaf and ensures everyone is paid in real time; all parties have access to Stripe’s dashboard to track volumes and performance. Releaf sees this as a game-changer for their relationship with German pharmacies.
Its dedicated German team now has three lead developers and a qualified pharmacist in Berlin as the German business lead for the territory.
Building on the UK tech build experience, Releaf has worked in lock step with its pharmacy launch partner Grafen Apoteke in Düsseldorf to reinvent the back-end platform, streamlining the pharmacy’s efficiency, ring-fencing resources to international expansion, Kirby assured, means its UK operation will not be impacted.
With 14 pharmacies already integrated into its new platform, including two in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Releaf is already ‘capable of serving the whole country and handling 10,000 prescriptions per day’.
Releaf is planning to stamp its mark on the market even more quickly than it managed in the UK.
“If we’re not in the top three clinics in Germany within three to six months, that’s failure. Because if someone’s got to market better than us, I haven’t met them yet, in any market.
“We’ll outrank every other clinic in Germany within three months. That’s how long it takes Google’s algorithms to recognise authority, and we can transfer some of the authority we’ve built in the UK to power our German site.”
Looking ahead, Releaf’s plans for expansion don’t stop in Germany. With the German move, Releaf has developed the agility to lift and shift at pace into other countries. Kirby says his ambition is to ‘roll out three new countries per quarter’.
