David Morrow gets out a minivan parked outside of Lume’s sprawling 225,000-square-foot facility in Evart, Michigan and walks through the front door and puts on a Tyvek jumpsuit and booties. He then steps into the air shower, a tight hallway that blasts purified air to remove any pests, mold and viruses that might be crawling on his hair, skin and clothes.
“This kills any hitchhikers,” Morrow says, explaining how his seven-year-old cannabis company has never lost a crop yield thanks to its near-obsessive biosecurity measures. “One small thing could kill a harvest.” Once inside the heart of the warehouse, he washes his hands and puts on a face mask and hairnet and opens a door to Grow Room 10, revealing about 900 high-grade marijuana plants, standing about three feet tall with big, fat buds reaching toward the LED lights.
“Every single time I come here it’s like having an out-of-body experience,” says Morrow, 55, who cofounded Lume with Belle Tire moguls and brothers Robert and Donald Barnes in 2019. “I can’t believe we have a weed factory.”
Power Plant: “We’ve built something that is institutionally investable and repeatable, ” Morrow says of Lume’s state-of-the-art facility in Michigan “All we need is access to cheap electricity and water.”
Ryan Garza for Forbes
Spanning 20 grow rooms containing 26,000 plants in any given week, Lume’s massive facility produces about 500 pounds of high-quality cannabis a week. With 114 harvests a year, that’s about 30 tons every 12 months, all of which is packaged as flower, rolled into joints, or turned into edibles, vapes, THC drinks and then sold through their 40 dispensaries across Michigan.
All of that product generated $190 million in revenue in 2025 and boasted a 42% margin, which is incredibly impressive as Michigan has the lowest wholesale and retail prices for marijuana in the country, a thriving illicit market, and has a punishing 24% wholesale tax rate levied last year.
“The new taxes kicked us in the nuts,” says Doug Hellyar, Lume’s president. “It cost us $10 million last year.”
Unlike many other cannabis companies that have raced to expand their footprints across multiple states—Florida-based Trulieve has 239 dispensaries across 8 states and Connecticut’s Curaleaf has 164 across 7 states—Lume has won big by going all in on Michigan, which Morrow calls the “Napa Valley of cannabis.” Morrow insists he would rather wait—like a “patient predator”—until it’s legal to ship his product across the country.
“I don’t believe that weed is going to be the only consumer packaged good (CPG) in the history of the U.S. that is not sold across state lines,” says Morrow as he walks through the drying room where 900 plants hang upside from racks on the ceiling. “Once we’re able to cross borders and sell in other states, we’ll be slashing people’s throats. They’re not ready for the knife fight.”
That kind of competitive spirit once made Morrow one of the best lacrosse players in the country. At Princeton in the early 1990s, he was a three-time All-American and helped lead the university to its first NCAA championship in 1992, the same year he founded Warrior Sports from his dorm room. Much as Warrior pioneered the use of titanium shafts for lacrosse sticks, Morrow has brought the same innovative attitude to Lume.
Big Score: Morrow founded Warrior Sports as a star lacrosse player at Princeton, before selling the company to New Balance. “I would not have had the ability to scale Lume from zero to $200 million,” he says, “without scaling Warrior’s hockey and soccer business.”
Larry French
The company has been able to dominate the Michigan market thanks to its low costs of production and its state-of-the-art Evart facility. (It costs Lume about $6 to produce its products on a per unit basis and it has an average selling price per unit of $11.) Built by the local industrial design firm Gallagher-Kaiser Corporation—known for General Motor’s Factory Zero—the plant cost $45 million to construct.
“We’ve built something that is institutionally investable and repeatable, which is the core of manufacturing,” says Morrow, who grew Warrior into a $20 million (annual sales) business before selling it to New Balance in 2004 for what Forbes estimates to be $50 million. “We can build this in Texas, Florida, or Tennessee, it doesn’t matter how hot, humid or cold it is. All we need is access to cheap electricity and water.”
Brady Cobb, a longtime cannabis entrepreneur and the founder of Florida-based Sunburn Cannabis, considers the facility a marvel.
“Lume built something that would be very well received by a federal regulator,” says Cobb. “Morrow is thinking about [how the industry will look in] 2030 while everyone else is thinking about 2027; he is living in a different timeline. If a big CPG company wants to produce a product that is consistent and every bag tastes and looks the same, this is the facility.”
Manufacturing and entrepreneurship are in Morrow’s blood. He grew up in Troy, Michigan, his mother was a Catholic school teacher, and his dad was a serial small business owner who ran a metal tubing business. At 14, Morrow started working at one of his dad’s companies, which made casting molds for the steel industry. His main sport was hockey but started playing lacrosse in middle school during the off season, where he excelled. At Princeton, he became the first defenseman to be named NCAA player of the year.
During one game a year before the championship tournament, his dad was in the stands and noticed his son ran off the field to get a new stick a few times. Morrow explained to his dad that his aluminum stick would get bent and had to be switched out for a new one. His father had a client who had him make a stronger snowshoe and he experimented with titanium—a metal with the highest strength-to-density ratio—and suggested it would make a durable stick. He made a prototype and gave it to David, who brought it to practice. Afterwards, nine teammates asked him to make them one.
“It’s time you start a company,” his father suggested after Princeton won the championship. Warrior was born, which is named after Morrow’s high school mascot, and became the first manufacturer of a titanium lacrosse stick.
After graduating Princeton, Morrow juggled playing lacrosse professionally and running Warrior. Sitting in his workshop outside Detroit, he thought he made a mistake, thinking about how most of his Ivy Leagues friends went on to become lawyers and bankers. He had raised about $10,000 from his dad, $230,000 from his then girlfriend, now wife, and $1 million from his college friend Billy Frist, a member of the billionaire family that founded Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare.
“I was super stressed out,” says Morrow. “My dad, girlfriend and friend are all invested and I had no idea what I was doing.”
By 1996, Warrior surpassed $1 million in revenue. A few years later, he expanded his product line to gloves and other equipment after meeting a big manufacturer of sports gloves Akio Aoki. In 1998, he was playing for Team U.S.A. in the World Lacrosse Championships and Warrior was the team’s sponsor. Before the championship game against Canada, his team manager told him: “If we lose, you won’t be able to give Warrior equipment away.” Team U.S.A. won in double overtime. And “Warrior took off,” says Morrow.
Sales reached $15 million by 2003. That same year, New Balance called. Jim Davis, the billionaire behind the sportswear behemoth, wanted to talk about Warrior. In a meeting at Davis’s office in Boston, Morrow said his company wasn’t for sale—“Everything is for sale,” Morrow remembers Davis saying. About a year later, Davis was right and Morrow sold to New Balance. Morrow stayed on and grew Warrior—adding hockey and soccer equipment to the brand and expanding manufacturing facilities around the world, from Mexico to Russia. (He has the stories to prove it: two security guards patrolling their Mexico equipment factory were killed by drug dealers, his salesman in Russia fled the country after getting death threats and a government official threatened Morrow’s business for refusing to give a distribution deal to a Putin ally.)
“Davis was like a second father to me,” says Morrow. “Some of the best memories of my life were at New Balance. I would not have had the ability to scale Lume from zero to $200 million without scaling Warrior’s hockey and soccer business for Jim—he changed my life.”
In 2018, so did a longtime friend. Robert Barnes, the successful Michigan entrepreneur who owns Belle Tire with his brother Donald, had started a small medical cannabis company in the state. Barnes and his brother had one dispensary in Evart and were building out a cultivation facility close by. Barnes says he started developing the property a few years prior to become a greenhouse to grow tomatoes, berries and peppers after an exodus of employers left the rural farming town struggling economically. “It wasn’t about us making money, it was about saving a town,” says Barnes. When adult-use cannabis was legalized in Michigan in 2018, Barnes decided to focus on weed instead and started pushing Morrow to quit New Balance and join as a cofounder. Barnes says he wanted Morrow for his “manufacturing prowess.”
After 25 years with Warrior, Morrow decided to take a leap, bringing his COO, Doug Hellyar, along with him. He changed the name to Lume (derived from the Latin word for “light”) and started raising money—$250 million in total. Morrow opened his first Lume store in Kalamazoo in the fall of 2019, a 4,000-square-foot building in a former night club. Then he grew the company from one dispensary and one cultivation site to the $45 million Evart facility, 40 stores, and 1,400 employees.
“It was a blur,” says Morrow. “We went into super scaling mode.”
Now standing between two tall white shelves filled with a couple dozen 30-gallon barrels of cannabis flower, he brings two handfuls of a strain called Pineapple Donut near his face and inhales deeply. “People have no idea how much time, money and effort it takes to make sure people have a good experience,” he says.
He remembers being a young stoner at Princeton dreaming of having this much weed. Now, every week the barrels in the curing room are swapped for another batch of 500 pounds.
“Back in the day, it was always feast or famine,” he laughs. “Today, it’s about limitless supply.”