Laura Hand is the CEO and Founder of Laura Loo Experience Design (LLXD). LLXD helps cannabis brands execute their vision by crafting a delightful brand strategy for every touchpoint of the customer journey to provide the experience their customers want and deserve. Laura’s background consists of starting her career as a UX web designer. Her 13-year tenure that culminated to the creative director role saw significant growth for the company, which specializes in digital strategy for financial institutions and health care businesses.
From there she built herself as a young leader inside and outside of the work environment, by volunteering countless hours for local community groups. She was most influential in her local chapter of the American Advertising Federation, in which she served as president for six years, won eleven American Advertising Awards (ADDYs) for web design and print work and was honored with the coveted AAF Silver Medal Award in 2014. In this same year, she was elected to a four-year term on the American Advertising Federation’s District 9 Board of Governors, providing leadership to clubs and federations in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. She was also a Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier 20 Under 40 award recipient and a finalist for Iowa Women of Innovation – Business Innovation and Leadership award.
In 2016, Laura was promoted to vice president of VGM Marketing, an internal agency that specializes in marketing for the 25+ businesses of VGM Group, Inc. VGM Group is one of the largest healthcare member service organizations (MSO) in the country serving over 17,000 customers. She led a team of more than 20 marketing experts dedicated to finding creative and strategic solutions to help VGM expand its healthcare services and better serve their customers.
In 2019 she left the corporate world to realign her focus to the cannabis industry to honor her family. The loss of her brother to a drug-related heart attack and her father to brain cancer has forever shaped her life. She believes that proper education and access to cannabis would have changed their outcome.