Head of Brand & Retail Marketing

Are you ready to join Connecticut Innovation’s vibrant community of innovators? Connecticut Innovations ("CI") is Connecticut’s strategic venture capital arm, and we are passionate about serving our portfolio of 220+ companies across various industries, with strengths in life sciences, technology, and climate tech.

About 1906

We started 1906 because we believe cannabis is the greatest medicine on earth. Our goal is to make cannabis a trusted, normal part of daily wellness with products that are easy to understand and easy to fit into your life and offer the most healthful format of cannabis available. 1906 is named for the last time cannabis was widely accepted as a beneficial medicine.

The Wiley Act was enacted the following year, beginning nearly a century of misguided cannabis prohibition with devastating consequences. We say it’s high time to make cannabis accessible and understandable for all—for the greater good (and the greater fun).

Head of Brand & Retail Marketing

$175,000 - $200,000 + Bonus

This role reports to the CEO and serves as the brand steward of 1906 across 1,200+ dispensaries, liquor and brick-and-mortar retail (2 states today, 20+ by 2027), and all consumer-facing brand touchpoints.

You will work in close partnership with our Head of Ecommerce & Growth, who owns performance marketing and digital revenue. You own how the brand shows up. They own how traffic converts.

Together, you make the machine work.

You'll lead a small internal team, manage agencies and freelancers, and ensure 1906 shows up correctly everywhere consumers encounter us.

This is not a role where you manage from a distance. This is a role for someone who wants to:

• Walk stores and rethink shelves
• Build campaigns and write briefs that inspire real creative
• Create retail programs and fix POS
• Sit with sales and obsess over packaging
• Make the brand sharper, everywhere

Who You Are

• You believe great ideas build brands
• You love retail. You walk stores for fun. You understand merchandising, education, and how things move off shelves.
• You care deeply about consumers and what they care about
• You understand data but use it directionally. You're not a slave to dashboards.
• You obsess over every touchpoint: packaging, POS, sampling, shelf, copy, displays
• You move fast. You test. You refine.
• You're passionate about cannabis, functional wellness, or the non-alc movement
• You're low ego, high output, and comfortable doing whatever needs doing

What You'll Do

Brand Leadership

• Define positioning, messaging hierarchy, and how 1906 shows up across all channels
• Translate our science into stories people remember
• Write briefs that inspire real creative
• Protect brand integrity across markets, retailers, and partners
• Ensure consistency from packaging to POS to digital to field marketing

Dispensary Marketing (1,200+ doors)

• Build the playbook for what moves product: POS, education, merchandising, budtender engagement, promotions
• Partner with sales teams in each market to ensure programs execute in store
• Create scalable toolkits that work market to market
• Spend real time in stores observing shopper behavior and refining programs

Liquor & Retail Expansion (2 states today, 20+ by 2027)

This role defines not just how the category shows up in liquor stores, but how it sells. Success is measured by better shelves, better education, and faster sell-through.

• Define how THC beverages and drink additives should be merchandised, explained, and experienced at shelf
• Build retail programs designed to increase velocity, not just awareness
• Partner with alcohol/beverage distributors to win shelf placement, secondary displays, and retail visibility
• Build relationships with key accounts like Total Wine and regional chains to develop co-marketing programs
• Create the consumer education playbook for a category most liquor shoppers don’t yet understand
• Identify which markets to prioritize based on retail readiness and commercial opportunity
• Build toolkits that scale market to market without losing effectiveness

Collaboration with Ecommerce & Growth

• Partner with the Head of Ecommerce & Growth to ensure brand and performance inform each other
• Develop campaign moments that live across retail and digital
• Sup…