Mother and son duo Tee Tee Brown and Bryce Savoy founded Euphorium Oakland, a Black-owned, family-operated cannabis delivery service in Oakland, California, that started in 2016. Brown and Savoy spoke to rolling out about Euphorium Oakland, and why they decided to get into the cannabis business.
What is Euphorium Oakland’s purpose beyond the delivery service?
Bryce Savoy: Our mission is to provide community and culture through cannabis and we’ve been doing that proudly. We’re just trying to serve our people — not through the actual product — but through community building and healing and just having organic relationships and friendships with our customers. We want to make people feel like family, so we bring them into the Euphorium family through cannabis.
Why did you choose the cannabis business?
Tee Tee Brown: I spent 20 years in pharmaceuticals, selling things to cardiologists, nephrologists and endocrinologists, so it was a natural change for me. I got laid off and was given a large severance check, and I was chilling for the first time since going to Howard. Bryce did an interview one day and he had a suit on and I asked him where [he’d been], and he said he had just got a job with an attorney to set up dispensaries. Two or three weeks prior to that, The Game had been on “The Breakfast Club,” and he was talking about how cannabis was about to become legal. I had no idea it was even about to be legal, but I was like, “I could do that.” I had some money in the bank, so I started the business and we never looked back since.
How did you come up with the name?
TTB: We were thinking about an emporium, as in a store. You can go to an emporium for your euphoria, which means a feeling of excitement and happiness.
How beneficial can cannabis be to one’s health?
TTB: If you give me an ailment, I can show you ways that cannabis can benefit you. Whatever your ailment is, [there are] ways that it will help. It’s amazing. It came from God. I feel like cannabis is going to have a hard time becoming federally legal because the drug companies don’t want it to be federally legal. It’s that good, it’s free, it comes from the ground, they can’t control it, and they can’t put a patent on it. The minute that it does become legal, they’re going to be selling a drug that has cannabis in it, and there’s gonna be prescriptions for it. Cannabis is that good.
