Our Founder’s Story:
Evan Eneman
Meet the Maestro
A great conductor has a complete vision of the orchestra as a whole. They have a deep understanding of the role each section plays, a precise grasp of rhythm and momentum, and an intuitive feel for audience dynamics. They know when to push, when to pull back, what motivates the players, and what leaves audiences delighted and yearning for more.
Culture-defining brands require this conductor-level vision of the enterprise as a whole. Most founders and advisors see one thing clearly. The investor sees the market. The founder sees the product. The artist sees the story. What is genuinely rare is the person who sees all of it at once and knows how to make it move together.
As founder and leader of Sands Lane, Evan Eneman has spent the last 25 years building a practice at the precise intersection of culture, content, and commerce, the three forces that determine whether a brand breaks down or breaks through. He orchestrates the three elements simultaneously, the way a conductor brings an ensemble into alignment: with a clear idea of success, the discipline to get every part there, and the perspective to create a positive impact for everyone involved.
Raised on Art, Hospitality, and the Fundamentals of Care
Evan did not acquire his appreciation for culture. He was raised inside it.
The youngest son of artists and caregivers, he grew up in a New York home where beauty was taken seriously and hospitality was a way of life. His mother kept a table that was always open, a home that belonged to everyone. His father, a physician who practiced medicine the old way, sitting with patients long enough to actually understand their lives before prescribing anything, modeled a kind of attentiveness that Evan has never stopped applying to his work. The walls were filled with art. Travel was not a luxury, it was a curriculum: from Broadway to Egypt and back, experiences that accumulated into a specific sensibility about what makes things worth making.
At Wharton, while earning his degree in economics, he studied sitar, photography, and creative writing alongside his finance coursework. He was not a business student who dabbled in the arts. He was someone trying to understand how all of it connected. A semester at Temple University's campus in Rome deepened that further: printmaking, advanced photography, and art history studied in the city that redefined the relationship between beauty and power.
The dual nature that defines his work today, rigorous and creative, commercial and cultural, was not a professional development. It was a formation.
Before the Boardroom, the Kitchen
Evan's professional career began on the corner of Sands Lane and Cedar Avenue, where as a precocious youth he launched his first food and beverage venture: an iced tea stand.
This early submersion into the street-level economics of supply and demand sparked formative years of hands-on experience with food and beverage operations. Inspired by early learning from TV chefs, he trained at the French Culinary Institute before working in restaurant and retail environments. There he managed operations and teams of 80+ employees across in-store and online channels. This experience taught him how to manage a supply chain and deliver a consistent experience at scale.
Long before Evan was advising CPG brands on how to bring a product to market, he was doing it himself from the ground up: managing inventory, training staff, handling the logistics of food and beverage production in real time, under real pressure. That experience gave him something no boardroom could: an operator's instinct for where a consumer brand actually lives or dies, in the details that are invisible until they break.
The Conductor Finds His Score
Immersion in the music business taught Evan something that balance sheets never could: what it costs when the business gets in the way of the art, and what it looks like when it does not.
As Director of Operations, Partner, and Executive Producer at music production companies, he spent years at the center of working creative organizations. He managed artist careers, negotiated rights agreements, oversaw brand and endorsement deals, ran music publishing operations, and managed production on dozens of film and commercial projects, including an Academy Award winning film. He was responsible for the financial and operational infrastructure that allowed artists and creators to do their work.
What the work revealed was something that would stay with him. Creative output is not separate from business structure. It is produced by it. The financial model, the operational rhythm, the way decisions get made and by whom: all of it either creates conditions where creative work can flourish, or quietly kills it before it reaches the audience. Evan learned to read both layers simultaneously, and to build the kind of structure that gives creative people room to do their best work while ensuring the business around them can actually sustain and scale.
That distinction, between organizations built to extract and organizations built to create, became a lens he has never stopped looking through.
The Institutional Foundation
Evan's understanding of how institutions think, how capital actually moves, and what differentiates a business built to truly scale was shaped by his career performing advisory work at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
For over a decade, Evan got inside the machinery of the world's largest and most complex organizations and learned exactly how they function. His client roster included Goldman Sachs, AIG, Swiss Re, NBCUniversal, Facebook, and Snap. The work spanned business process audits, technology governance, cybersecurity, SOX compliance, and financial controls across banking, capital markets, insurance, consumer tech and media.
This experience shaped an essential aspect of how Evan looks at a brand to read the underlying structure to spot and address foundational weaknesses that could become fatal flaws. He sees where the financial model does not match the go-to-market strategy, where the operational infrastructure will break under growth, or where the governance is too thin to support what the founders are trying to build.
That diagnostic instinct was developed across a decade of working inside the most scrutinized organizations in the world.
The Bet That Changed Everything
In 2014, Evan partnered with Snoop Dogg to co-found Casa Verde Capital, one of the first and most influential venture capital firms in the cannabis space.
This was not a safe move. Institutional investment in cannabis was still largely theoretical. Most serious capital was watching from a distance, waiting for regulatory clarity that had not arrived. Evan and his team moved first.
Casa Verde raised over $35M and built one of the earliest and most respected cannabis venture portfolios in the country, making investments that helped define the legal cannabis economy before most of its infrastructure existed.
More than a financial success, the launch of Casa Verde represented a culmination in Evan's career where financial discipline, cultural relationships, and a genuine belief in an emerging category converged for the first time in a single enterprise.
Building the Infrastructure of an Industry
Casa Verde proved that serious capital belonged in cannabis. What the industry needed next was equally serious infrastructure.
Coming off Casa Verde, Evan partnered with a national CPA and professional services firm to build one of the first dedicated cannabis accounting, tax, and advisory practices in the United States. The timing was deliberate. As medicinal and adult-use markets were opening state by state, the operators moving fastest often lacked the financial controls, compliance frameworks, and operational discipline that would determine whether they survived the next regulatory shift or collapsed under it.
Evan had spent a decade at PwC watching what happens when governance is treated as an afterthought inside large, complex organizations. He had seen the structural failures up close. The cannabis practice was built on that knowledge, working with the largest multi-state operators in the category and building the financial and operational rigor that separated enduring businesses from ones that would not survive the next market correction.
The practice generated over $25M in revenue in its first three years, placing the firm on top-50 industry lists and cementing Evan's standing as one of the most credible operational voices in an industry that had more than enough hype and not nearly enough discipline.
Sowing a Garden for Culture and Authenticity
While leading the cannabis professional services practice, Evan founded Fiorello as a cannabis-focused creative shop, taking on brand strategy, creative development, content production, digital marketing, and social media for brands in the space.
At a moment when most cannabis brands were either leaning on countercultural clichés or overcorrecting toward sterile corporate aesthetics, Fiorello helped clients build something in between: brands that were credible to cannabis culture and legible to mainstream consumers at the same time.
Running both operations integrated his comprehensive thinking around brand building. The discipline Evan applied to client financial structures sharpened how he thought about brand architecture. The creative instincts he expressed through Fiorello deepened how he advised operators on positioning and market strategy.
The Current Chapter: Sands Lane
Sands Lane is where everything converges.
Founded as Evan's platform for brand building and strategic advisory, Sands Lane operates on a simple but specific premise: the brands that endure in cannabis, functional beverages, and emerging wellness categories are the ones built on genuine cultural relationships, coherent content strategies, and sound commercial infrastructure.
The Iconic Tonics portfolio is the clearest expression of that philosophy in action. A seven-brand functional beverage platform built with Snoop Dogg, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, master mixologist Warren Bobrow, and others, each brand was built around a real relationship and a real point of view, not assembled for portfolio optics.
Today, Sands Lane works with founders, investors, and artists who need the full picture in one place. The work spans corporate strategy and financial transformation, brand strategy and architecture, creative direction, messaging and positioning, content strategy, experiential design and supply chain and distribution.
The firm’s list of clients and success stories reflects that range: from early-stage brands finding their footing to established operators repositioning for the next phase of growth. In every case, the engagement starts in the same place: understanding what the brand is actually trying to build, and assembling the right combination of strategy, creativity, and operational support to get it there.
Following The Through-Line
Sands Lane is where everything converges.
Founded as Evan's platform for brand building and strategic advisory, Sands Lane operates on a simple but specific premise: the brands that endure in cannabis, functional beverages, and emerging wellness categories are the ones built on genuine cultural relationships, coherent content strategies, and sound commercial infrastructure.
The Iconic Tonics portfolio is the clearest expression of that philosophy in action. A seven-brand functional beverage platform built with Snoop Dogg, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, master mixologist Warren Bobrow, and others, each brand was built around a real relationship and a real point of view, not assembled for portfolio optics.
Today, Sands Lane works with founders, investors, and artists who need the full picture in one place. The work spans corporate strategy and financial transformation, brand strategy and architecture, creative direction, messaging and positioning, content strategy, experiential design and supply chain and distribution.
The firm’s list of clients and success stories reflects that range: from early-stage brands finding their footing to established operators repositioning for the next phase of growth. In every case, the engagement starts in the same place: understanding what the brand is actually trying to build, and assembling the right combination of strategy, creativity, and operational support to get it there.
Credentials
Evan Eneman is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with concentrations in finance, operations, marketing, and information management. He is a Board Member and former Chapter President of the Wharton Club of Southern California, a member of the Board of Directors for telehealth platform Heally Inc., co-founder of the Wharton Alumni Angel Network of Southern California, a former Board Member of the Los Angeles Cannabis Task Force, and a former executive team member at Minds Matter of Los Angeles. He has held Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/US) certifications. He is based in Los Angeles.
