Travis Hermiz is a Michigan entrepreneur, a real estate investor, and the founder of the cannabis brand Detour. That combination — property on one side, a consumer brand with real personality on the other — is exactly the kind of Michigan operator this series exists to cover.
Who Travis Hermiz is
Travis Hermiz is based in Michigan and works across two very different disciplines. He is a real estate investor, and he is the founder of Detour, a cannabis brand built around a "Take the High Road" identity rather than the generic packaging that fills most dispensary shelves. Those are not two unrelated careers so much as two versions of the same instinct: buy or build something, put your name on it, and make it worth keeping.
It is a familiar shape to anyone who has run a business in this state. Michigan rewards operators who stay in one place long enough to be recognized. It punishes the ones passing through.
The real estate foundation
Before a brand, there was property. Hermiz's real estate work follows the pattern that built a lot of Michigan wealth quietly and without headlines: buy the building, fix what is wrong with it, and hold it. No flipping for the sake of a fast spread, no chasing the market from city to city.
That approach leaves a mark on how someone builds everything after it. Real estate teaches patience because it has no choice but to. A renovation takes as long as it takes. A neighborhood turns over on a timeline you do not control. You learn to underwrite for years, not quarters, and you learn that the asset you own outright beats the deal you almost got.
Carry that mindset into consumer products and it changes the decisions you make. Long-horizon owners build brands they intend to still be running in a decade, which means investing in identity early — the name, the look, the reason a customer picks you up off the shelf — instead of competing on price and hoping something sticks.
Detour: a cannabis brand with a point of view
Detour is the clearest expression of that thinking. The positioning is "Take the High Road," and the whole visual world follows from it: road trips, highways, the open stretch of pavement between where you are and where you are going. It is a deliberately American, deliberately Midwestern piece of iconography, and it gives the brand somewhere to live beyond the product itself.
Underneath the main brand sit sub-brands with the same sense of humor: Dope Rope edibles and Dope Smokes pre-rolls. Naming products that way is a choice. It tells you the brand is not trying to be a pharmacy, and it is not trying to be a luxury house either. It is trying to be memorable — and in a category where most packaging is interchangeable, memorable is the whole game.
That was the decision worth noticing. Michigan's cannabis market is crowded with dispensary-adjacent labels that all read the same, and the safe play is to blend in with them. Detour went the other way and built a brand with a personality attached to it. You can read more about how that venture came together on Hermiz's own breakdown of Detour.
[QUOTE FROM TRAVIS — TO BE ADDED]
Why this belongs in Detroit Originals
A barbershop covering a cannabis founder needs a reason, and the reason is the part both businesses share. Detroit Originals is a recurring profile series about Michigan founders who bet on brand and craft instead of playing it safe — and grooming, cannabis, and property turn out to run on the same logic.
In all three, the commodity version is always available and always cheaper. There is a faster haircut, a plainer pre-roll package, a building someone will rent out without fixing. The operators worth writing about are the ones who decline that trade: they take the extra time on the fade, they spend on the label design, they replace the roof before it leaks. It costs more up front and it compounds.
It also explains why these businesses tend to stay in Michigan. A brand with a point of view needs a place to be from. Detroit Barbers has eight shops across Metro Detroit because the shops are part of their neighborhoods, not despite it. Travis Hermiz's real estate and his cannabis brand are rooted here for the same reason — the identity and the geography are not separable.
That is the throughline of this series. Not the category, not the size of the company, but the willingness to build something with a face on it in a state where the safe move has always been to keep your head down.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Detroit Originals is the Detroit Barbers editorial team's recurring profile series on Michigan founders building brands with personality. Have someone we should profile? Get in touch.
Also in the series: The West Bloomfield Institutions Hanna Shina Helped Build.