Autumn Shelton

Partner and CFO

Autumn Brands

Autumn Shelton is partner and Chief Financial Officer of Autumn Brands, a 50 percent woman-owned cannabis business located in sunny coastal Carpinteria, Santa Barbara County, California. She has spent almost 4 years successfully navigating the unchartered waters of California’s medical marijuana collective model and the newly legal cannabis industry.  A calculated risk taker with an outstanding aptitude for numbers, Autumn champions the health and wellness benefits of cannabis and is committed to cultivation free of pesticides.

In her position as CFO, Autumn is a strategic decision maker for the family farm, which started in Holland more than 100 years ago. Along with overseeing the company’s financials, she is in charge of legal compliance on the local and state levels. This includes, but is not limited too, ordinances, regulations, packaging, permits, and licensing. Another farm duty is walking the greenhouses once or twice a week to check on “the ladies” (only the female cannabis plant produces the valuable flower). Autumn also is a face of the company and regularly meets with other executives in the cannabis industry. 

Immediately after college graduation, Autumn earned her real estate license and worked for Prudential California Real Estate. Industrious and focused, she further earned her Real Estate Brokers License and started her own company, Platform Real Estate, to focus on the REO (foreclosure) market. This was followed by a job as an REO Asset officer at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, where she managed their foreclosed residential and commercial portfolio.

Autumn switched industries and took her financial acumen to the agricultural sector. A commercial cut flower grower needed help with cost efficiencies. In 2015, her commercial cut flower growing boss, a fifth-generation farmer, was approached to lease his greenhouses to grow medical marijuana. After very careful vetting and intensive risk assessment led by Autumn, medical marijuana was given the green light. Shortly after that, Autumn’s then boss, now partner, decided to seed a medical marijuana collective in some of his other greenhouses. On Jan. 1, 2018, Autumn Brands, the for-profit company under the new regulations MAUCRSA, began operating. MAUCRSA is the Medical and Adult Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act.

Autumn was born in Carpinteria, though raised out of the area. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in Italian, from UC Santa Barbara. Generous with her knowledge and expertise, Autumn is a sought-after panelist and public speaker on the nuts and bolts of operating a licensed California cannabis cultivation business. She and her husband Abe make their home in Santa Barbara with their young son, Lennox and daughter, Jade.