The Poland-based Nakło Foundation today relaunched its global hemp B2B marketplace HempTrade with an enriched array of products and a special promotional offer for producers and other wholesale vendors.
HempTrade is for all kinds of hemp products — branded and white label wholesale, bulk and raw materials, said Kehrt Reyher of the Nakło Foundation.
“It’s a critical moment for the industry. Trust is increasingly in short supply because of all the nefarious players out there,” said Reyher, who notes that HempTrade verifies all vendors on its platform. “First, we want to know exactly who they are,” said Reyher. “Equally important, of course, is that they have superior products and responsive service.”
CBD sector is troublesome
HempTrade carries out basic due diligence on all vendors on its platform, a process particularly critical with respect to CBD sellers.
Reyher said the fast-moving CBD sector is increasingly marked by a get-rich-quick mentality that leads to problems on both the supplier and customer sides.
“It’s getting to the point where lab paperwork and certification documents are less and less a guarantee of product quality,” he said. “Of course, the major problem is in big, bulk CBD deals. There are a lot of stories of people being ripped off.”
Reyher said the number of sellers and products in that category on HempTrade will be slowly and carefully expanded.
Guitars to building materials
Meanwhile HempTrade is featuring a wide range of products in other hemp sectors — from a guitar and a skateboard made of hemp plastic to a hand-made cat basket, hemp soaps and shampoos, fashion intimates and building materials. An extensive offering of cultivation seeds will come online in the weeks ahead, Reyher said.
Through the nearly 24-months HempTrade has been online, top product category searches have been for bulk CBD, flowers for CBD extraction, planting seeds, building materials, food & drinks and hemp oil, in that order, Reyher said.
No commissions
HempTrade works on a paid-listing basis. For an annual flat fee, vendors can list their products and get exposure on the Foundation’s flagship HempToday international business news website via banners and links. HempTrade takes no commissions.
“We’re not brokers, and we don’t have a warehouse of products,” Reyher said. “Our mission is to simply connect the right people and companies to enhance trade and support value chain development.”
HempTrade launched initially in 2017, and since that time has interacted extensively with both buyers and sellers, developing strategies and tools to best help them. With that intelligence, the platform has been re-engineered to enhance the B2B sales communication process, Reyher said of the relaunch.
Key personnel named
Czech cannabis veteran Katerina Binkova will serve in a sales support and website administrator position. An IT services professional, she was the founder (1999) of KONOPA, a non-profit Czech NGO that promotes industrial hemp. She also has worked with legacy European hemp firm Hempoint.
HempTrade is one in a suite of hemp-focused websites managed under the Nakło Foundation. In addition to HempToday, the most recognizable international media brand for industrial hemp — also online in Japanese and Spanish, Nakło Foundation is developing Enterprise Hemp, a matchmaking platform for entrepreneurs.
The Foundation organizes a series of hemp industry micro-summits annually at its industrial hemp Center of Excellence in Poland, and is co-organizer of the Asian Hemp Summit, Kathmandu, Nepal, and the Latin American & Caribbean Hemp Summit, Montevideo, Uruguay. It also publishes HempToday magazine, a quarterly that is distributed at hemp events around the world.
