“That will be the consumption lounge,” Scheffler said, " A club that will be elevated two stories with live plants inside splash pools so you can take your off and dance in the water while you’re consuming cannabis.” Plans are to add a 15,000-square-foot space at the center of the horseshoe. But it’s the vision for Phase 3 that will truly make touching down on Planet 13 the weed head’s equivalent of visiting Disneyland: In Phase 2, the rest of the 40,000-square-foot horseshoe-shaped building will be built out and used for ancillary retail and on-site private-label production (both with immersive entertainment elements). Beyond that, he and co-CEO Bob Groesbeck have ambitious plans for their Orange County outpost, of which the dispensary represents just the first of three phases. Scheffler said the aim is to add new elements every couple of months and that next up will be mechanical butterflies - with 18-inch wingspans - fluttering around the dispensary. The indoor rain effect isn’t the only new thing visitors can expect on future visits. “The ultimate goal, once I have time to work it all out with the fire department, is to have a CO2 machine that goes on top of every umbrella and hits so that it drips down intermittently like rain,” Scheffler said. If you happen to pull your gaze away from the glass-topped cases crammed with all manner of cannabis flower, concentrates, vaporizer cartridges and edibles and look up, you’ll see dozens of brightly colored umbrellas (another visual touch carried over from the Vegas location) dangling from the ceiling. “I guess we’re going to have to have a contest and name the thing.” 7. “I actually don’t think it has a name yet,” Scheffler said when asked. Despite being in the shadow of two Orange County theme parks (Knott’s Berry Farm is about 14 miles away), the cephalopod doesn’t have a moniker. The visual centerpiece of the 16,500-square-foot, 50-cash-register retail sales floor is a 16-foot-tall sculptural installation of a bright red octopus perched - tentacles outstretched - atop another massive red orb.
(In case you were wondering, the numerical part of the name comes from the fact that the word marijuana starts with “M” - which is the 13th letter of the alphabet.) Big enough to be seen from several blocks away, the globe represents the planet in the Planet 13 branding. The first visual you’re likely to see - especially if you’re rolling in off the 405 and heading east - is the massive red orb shimmering with cascading water that marks the entrance to the dispensary. What, exactly, is on tap for cannathusiasts who trek to this Disneyesque dispensary? Below are the seven trippiest things that caught my attention during a walkthrough of the O.C.'s newest palace of pot. (It doesn’t hurt that Santa Ana is the only city in a county of more than 3 million residents with legal retail cannabis storefronts up and running.) “Las Vegas gets about 55 million visitors a year there’s about 50 million to here - Orange County - so it’s almost the same visitor volume,” he said. Scheffler said the dispensary’s proximity to Disneyland (the Anaheim theme park is 8.4 miles away) and the South Coast Plaza shopping center (three miles away) and its adjacency to the 405 Freeway will help it tap into a Vegas-like flow of tourists. That’s what’s helping us grow so fast it’s the social media.” “ advertise for us when they take a picture. “We have a hard time advertising, because we keep getting shut down on Facebook and so on because we’re cannabis,” Planet 13 co-Chief Executive Larry Scheffler said during a pre-opening tour. That’s because the over-the-top visuals and selfie-worthy backdrops are as much - if not more - a savvy marketing play as they are over-the-top entertainment. The second thing you need to know is that even if you’ve never heard of Planet 13’s over-the-top approach to slinging weed (a larger flagship opened in Las Vegas in November 2018) and your knowledge of pot culture begins and ends with Cheech & Chong’s 1978 stoner comedy “Up in Smoke,” the immersive, entertaining and totally Instagram-worthy approach to cannabis commerce is going to become only more prevalent as the state’s legal marijuana market matures. Like furniture-store big, CityTarget big and largest-dispensary-in-California big. The first thing you need to know about the Southland’s newest pot-superstore-meets-theme-park - Planet 13 Orange County, which opens to the public in Santa Ana today - is that it’s big.
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