Revelry Upstate 2026 Was the Best Trade Show We've Ever Done

Hudson, New York Is Not Where You'd Expect a Cannabis Trade Show

If you haven't been to Hudson, you're not alone. It's a couple hours up the Hudson River from the city, a small upstate town with one main street, surprisingly good food, and the kind of bones that make you wonder how you'd never heard of the place. Basilica Hudson, where the show ran, is a converted iron foundry that sits right on the river. Big, beautiful, very much not a convention center.

This is where Revelry Upstate happened last week. It ended up being the best show Halara has ever done.

A Table, Not a Booth

The setup mattered more than I expected. Hall of Flowers, for all the things I love about it, puts brands in semi-walled-off rooms. You're in a box. Buyers have to walk in to find you. Some never do.

Revelry Upstate was the opposite. Main hall, tables right next to each other, no walls. We were essentially standing in the aisle next to our product all day, which sounds exhausting and was, but it also meant every buyer walking the floor walked past us. Twelve feet from our table was Foy, the edible crew run by Moose and Jan, who turned out to be some of the most fun people we've spent two days next to in a long time. Their tagline is Better Ingredients. Better High., and it fits. (If you're in New York and you haven't tried what Foy is doing, fix that. Their Instagram even has a Grok shoutout, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2026.)

Total planning required: a table, our product, and a folder of order forms. Compared to a Hall of Flowers booth build, the prep was almost embarrassingly light. And it didn't matter. Buyers don't need a $50K booth to decide whether they like a product. They need to actually meet the people behind it, and a table puts you at exactly the right eye level for that.

The Tuesday Night Tell

Show ran Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday night, the entire cannabis floor decamped to the Governor Tavern down the street. (If you're ever passing through Hudson, regardless of why, go there. Get the hot honey fried chicken.)

The whole place was packed by 7. On a Tuesday. In May. In Hudson. And you could watch the bartender working the floor with this look on his face like he genuinely could not figure out why his quietest weeknight of the year had turned into a full house. Nobody had told him a cannabis trade show was in town. Every table was buyers, brands, distributors. Watching him try to make sense of it without context was the funniest thirty minutes of the trip.

That's the kind of moment that tells you what an event actually is. The energy was real enough that a town's worth of cannabis people made a Tuesday night at one tavern feel like a Saturday. Nobody fakes that.

The California Crew Showed Up

After dinner we ended up at the hotel bar with a handful of people who'd flown in from California, including Taylor and the Artist Tree crew. Whiskey, good food, three or four hours of just talking about life and business with people who'd taken the cross-country trip to be there. Lovely conversations, the kind you don't plan for but end up being the reason you remember a trip.

It also tells you something. California brands flying to a regional show in Upstate New York is not what the industry looked like two years ago. People are paying attention to this market now.

What Revelry Upstate Did for Halara

About eight orders on the spot. We're working follow-ups with the rest of the buyers we met all this week, and the early signs are good. You might be seeing Halara on a lot more New York shelves over the next couple months.

Cost-wise, it's the highest-ROI event we've ever done by a wide margin. A table costs a fraction of a booth build. Hudson is cheaper than Ventura on every line item. And the conversion was better, not worse, for being a smaller room with less infrastructure.

Why Smaller Cannabis Trade Shows Are Winning Right Now

The New York cannabis market is louder than the California one in 2026, in the sense that there's actually energy on the buyer side. Buyers in Ventura asked smart questions about margins. Buyers in Hudson asked smart questions and then placed orders at the table. Same intelligence, different urgency.

Smaller, regional, table-based shows might be the best thing happening in cannabis events right now. The big-booth-arms-race version of this game is getting more expensive every year while delivering less. A converted iron foundry on a river in a small upstate town just outperformed every big show we've done.

We'll be back in Hudson next year. And if you were at Revelry Upstate and we didn't catch you, hit me up. I've still got business cards to sort through.