CBD Kratom storefronts.

Inside the brief

CBD Kratom is a specialty retail chain with a footprint that did not behave like a standard retail rollout. 14 stores in the St. Louis metro area where the company is headquartered, and a growing nationwide footprint across street-retail and small-format urban storefronts. The product line is wide — over 650 SKUs spanning edibles, beverages, topicals, kratom powder, and capsules — and the merchandising story changes with new product launches and seasonal campaigns. The brief that came to CrownTV was direct: get a storefront window display into every store, fast, that stops people walking past on the sidewalk in direct sunlight.

The 'in direct sunlight' part is the hardest constraint in retail signage and the one most installs get wrong. A standard television behind storefront glass washes out at the brightness levels that most direct-sun-facing windows produce. Customers across the street cannot read the screen, the campaign creative is invisible, and the store has paid for technology that does not solve the storefront-marketing problem the brief was trying to address. The CBD Kratom brief required a panel that stayed visible from across the street at peak afternoon sun — which is a brightness-rating spec line, not a marketing line.

The deployment-speed constraint was the second half of the brief. CBD Kratom did not want a multi-month rollout with per-store site surveys, custom mount engineering, or per-location hardware variations. The chain wanted a uniform spec that worked across every store layout in the fleet, and they wanted the install timeline measured in days, not weeks. That meant the install kit had to be standardized before the rollout started — no field engineering, no per-location bespoke decisions.

Inside the install

Hardware: Samsung OM55B — 55-inch high-brightness commercial panel at 3,500 nits — in portrait orientation. The brightness rating is the headline of this install. 3,500 nits is roughly 10x a consumer television, which sits at around 350 nits in normal viewing modes. That ratio is what stops the panel from washing out behind storefront glass under direct afternoon sun. We chose portrait orientation because retail storefront windows typically have more vertical real estate than horizontal, and a portrait panel sized to that vertical lets the campaign creative carry more product imagery, more text, and more visual weight than a landscape panel of the same diagonal would.

The mounting choice is what made the 10-day chain-wide install timeline possible. The OM55B panels are cable-mounted with custom back covers, sited behind the storefront glass. That mount system works without requiring window-frame penetration — the mount references the storefront millwork, not the structural glazing — which dramatically simplified the per-store install process. We did not need to coordinate with mall lease teams about fixings into the storefront, did not need building-management approvals for structural work, did not need per-store engineering for unusual frame geometries. The custom back covers handle the cable termination and finish the install so the back of the panel reads cleanly when viewed from the store interior.

The standardization decision sits behind the speed result. We did not run pre-install site surveys. The hardware kit — panel, mount, back cover, cabling — was identical at every store, and that uniformity worked because we chose mount geometry that flexed across the variations CBD Kratom's footprint actually contained. Mall storefronts, urban street retail, suburban strip, downtown corner stores — same kit, same install playbook, same time-on-site target per store. The chain rollout ran like a manufacturing process, not a series of bespoke installs.

Content runs on the CrownTV Cloud Dashboard. The brand team publishes campaigns chain-wide and they ship to every storefront panel in the fleet within seconds. Localizing for a single store — a regional product launch, a store-specific event — works through the same dashboard. The 650-SKU product range and the rotation cadence the brief described are managed from one place, with no per-store content workflow.

After go-live

The full fleet of 55+ stores was installed in under 10 days. That is the result that mattered most to the chain, and it is the result the standardization decisions in the spec phase made possible. Customers stop walking past — the sun-readable storefront does the work the standard storefront merchandising could not. Brand campaigns publish chain-wide from the dashboard in seconds.

The chain is still expanding, and every new store ships on the same hardware kit with the same install timeline. New-store ramp time has dropped because the install team treats the storefront panel as a known quantity — same mount, same panel, same install steps, same content pipeline. There is no new-store engineering process to invent.

The reference value of this install is in the brightness rating and the standardization. Most chains overspec for some stores and underspec for others; CBD Kratom is on a single spec across every store, and that spec is bright enough to work in the worst-case sun-exposure storefront in the fleet. The result is a chain where every storefront produces the same brand moment regardless of which corner it is sited on.