The husband and wife team behind a Western Massachusetts cannabis dispensary say the store they built has been unfairly taken from them. The company they once partnered with said the couple has stolen the shop’s brand, logo, website and a significant portion of the staff.
Now, the matter is headed to court.
A lawsuit from Apical, Inc., which holds the licenses for the Easthampton dispensary Fyre Ants and Northampton dispensary EMBR, targets Kot and Leakhena Kasom, who until recently managed the two pot shops.
The couple founded Fyre Ants and say they still own the store’s name and brand.
In 2020, facing strapped finances, the Kasoms said they sought a buyer for two of the four cannabis business licenses they owned and found Panda Solutions Group, which operates cannabis businesses in multiple states.
Under an agreement, they ultimately transferred control of all four licenses to Apical, a subsidiary of Panda Solutions, and temporarily licensed the company to use the Fyre Ants name and brand, Kot Kasom said in an interview.
The sides also agreed that the retail license for the Fyre Ants dispensary would return to the Kasoms by June 2023, he said.
The couple continued working to build out the Easthampton shop, which opened in January 2022 on Northampton Street.
Kot Kasom said he and his wife poured half a million dollars of their own money into opening Fyre Ants, with the understanding that the retail license allowing the dispensary to operate would ultimately be transferred back to them.
“If the brand was not ours, if the store was not ours, nobody in their right mind would spend that amount of money,” he said.
Apical also opened EMBR in Northampton in the spring of 2022, and the Kasoms worked as general managers at the two retailers — until this fall.
Kot Kasom said the agreement allowing Apical to use the Fyre Ants brand at the Easthampton store expired in June. At that point, he and his wife argue, Apical should have returned the retail license to them and stopped using the Fyre Ants name.
The sides could not come to a new licensing agreement in negotiations earlier this year. In October, Apical registered the Fyre Ants trademark with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, records show. The Kasoms say that happened without their permission, and that they hold the legal rights to the name and brand. They sent a cease and desist letter to Apical at the end of October.
A representative of Apical did not respond to requests for further comment by phone or email.
Around the beginning of November, both Kot and Leakhena Kasom resigned from their jobs at the Easthampton and Northampton dispensaries and went to work at Turning Leaf, a Northampton pot shop that according to Apical’s lawsuit had been closed.
The Kasoms retained control of the Fyre Ants website and, according to the lawsuit, began using it to divert customers to Turning Leaf, a shop on King Street and a neighbor of EMBR. On the website, they began selling products as “Turning Leaf Powered By Fyre Ants,” according to the lawsuit.
The complaint says the Kasoms took part in “a campaign of misinformation” that gave the impression to customers that the Fyre Ants dispensary was out of business.
The Turning Leaf dispensary at 261 King St. in Northampton. (Juliet Schulman-Hall/MassLive).Juliet Schulman-Hall/MassLive
Some customers came to the Fyre Ants store to pick up cannabis products purchased online, that instead had been ordered from Turning Leaf, Apical said.
The Kasoms have since repurposed the Fyre Ants dispensary website, fyreants.com, to sell Fyre Ants brand clothing. A message posted on the site says they are “no longer associated with the dispensary in Easthampton.”
More than a dozen employees of Apical followed the Kasoms to Turning Leaf, the lawsuit says. Their mass resignation in the week following the Kasoms’ departure forced the Fyre Ants store to close for several days.
Kot Kasom denied that he and his wife encouraged employees to come to work for them at Turning Leaf.
The sides will appear in Hampshire Superior Court in Northampton on Thursday afternoon for a hearing on a preliminary injunction. Apical is seeking damages and is asking the court to order the return of the Fyre Ants website and certain business information to the company.
The website for the Fyre Ants dispensary has been repurposed to sell clothing. A message says the brand “is no longer associated with the dispensary in Easthampton.”fyreants.com
Reached by email, a spokesperson for the state’s Cannabis Control Commission said the agency does not comment on pending litigation between private parties.
Northampton attorney Dick Evans, a longtime advocate of legalized cannabis who reviewed the lawsuit, called the complicated case “a garden variety business dispute.”
But what it signified, he added, were the lengths the cannabis industry has come. Disagreements among legal cannabis sellers are resolved in court, not on the street as they might have been when the drug was illegal in Massachusetts.
“It’s a welcome change from the days of prohibition,” Evans remarked.
