Dispensary Spotlight: How a Trademark Fight Turned Urbana Into Three of the Bay Area's Best Cannabis Lounges

Urbana is one of San Francisco's original dispensary brands, and today it runs three shops across two cities: 4811 Geary Boulevard in the Richmond, 33 29th Street in the Mission, and a newer outpost at 415 W. Grand Avenue in Uptown Oakland. All three open at 10 a.m. and run to 9 p.m. daily, and all three are built around the same idea — a consumption lounge attached to the retail floor, so the shop doubles as a place to actually sit down and use what you just bought.

The company didn't start as Urbana. Owner and CEO Marty Higgins opened his first store on Geary Boulevard in January 2016 under the holding company Cosecha, branding it Harvest — one of the first recreational-adjacent shops on that stretch of the Richmond. The name became a problem in 2017, when Harvest Health & Recreation, an Arizona-based multistate operator that would go on to trade at roughly a $2 billion market cap, accused Higgins of copying its name and logo after showing him around its Tempe operations back in 2014. Higgins called the resemblance an oversight and said he'd fix it; the two companies spent the next few years in a trademark dispute complicated by a genuinely weird legal wrinkle — both sides held trademark registrations, but federal law still treats cannabis as a Schedule I drug, so it wasn't obvious whose registration should even count.

Higgins' fix arrived on Leap Day, February 29, 2020: a full rebrand to Urbana, timed to the company's five-year anniversary. The launch party, "Leap of the Decade," took over both San Francisco stores for an all-day vendor market — DJs, lounge tastings, and promotional pricing from partner brands — marking the split from the Harvest name for good. Higgins and co-owner/COO Steve Sukman built the new brand around an operating philosophy Higgins still repeats: "Keep It Simple Sunshine." In practice that meant redesigning the stores around open floor plans and the lounges, rather than the fortress-style dispensary layout that defined the category's early years.

The Oakland location extended that same playbook across the bay. At 415 W. Grand, the lounge is positioned as a neighborhood hub as much as a place to buy flower — hosting live music, comedy nights, and educational workshops alongside the usual menu of flower, vapes, concentrates, edibles, and drinks. It's a bet that's paid off for other operators too: cannabis consumption lounges have gone from a regulatory afterthought to one of the clearer differentiators in a market where most shops are selling the same handful of statewide brands.

Nine years and one rebrand after that first Geary Boulevard opening, Urbana's pitch hasn't really changed — just the name on the door. For a Bay Area retail market that's seen plenty of multistate operators come and go, a locally owned three-shop chain that survived a trademark fight with a $2 billion opponent and came out the other side with lounges in three neighborhoods is its own kind of staying power.