an interview with the co-founders of Ladies of Paradise & Lady Jays

i talked to CEO Jade Daniels and COO Harlee Case about the need to uplift women in the cannabis space

Jan 04, 2021

Happy New Year gardeners! I’m not much for wishful thinking, nor do I believe the simple turning of a clock will bring with it joy and peace, but here’s hoping 2021 has slightly better prospects — if not, just the ability to puff, puff, pass with a group of friends.

Without further ado, I sat down with two of the women behind the design and branding company Ladies of Paradise and its cannabis subsidiary Lady Jays (launched in 2018): CEO and co-founder Jade Daniels and chief operating officer, co-owner and creative director Harlee Case.

Ladies of Paradise, an all-woman creative agency based in Portland, aims to revolutionize how women are seen within the cannabis space — one rainbow design featuring pastel pinks and sky-blues at a time. Currently, the company offers cannabis event planning services, graphic design, packaging, creative content development, educational meet-ups and product lines ranging from clothing to CBD and CBG pre-rolls. By centering the feminine experience within the industry, Ladies of Paradise seeks to “elevate the aesthetic and remove the stigma from cannabis and the people who make up this community.”

ladiesofparadise

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Q&A with Jade & Harlee

How did you come up with the concept of Ladies of Paradise? What gap were you seeing in the industry that you wanted to fill?

HC: Ladies of Paradise started with just Jade a few years before I hopped on the team. When she moved to Oregon, her and her fiancé at the time were opening dispensaries and so she was getting a real glimpse into the business owners and who was helping, who was growing — who's actually doing the work — and found that there were so many women that were doing really badass things in the industry and not really getting credit for it.

So her and I teamed up and started going and shooting on farms, shooting different growers in extraction facilities and just trying to really put a feminine spin on it and showing that weed is absolutely for women and made by women just like it is made for men by men.

We wanted to market towards women and we wanted to help women feel comfortable with weed and we also wanted them to stop being over-sexualized because that was something that we saw a lot when women were used in marketing: They were wearing bikinis and rubbing bongs and we were like, “OK, that is not what's going on here and we need to show the world what actually is happening in cannabis.’

JD: We wanted to not sexualize women and also to bring creativity and art into cannabis because a lot of the stuff that was out there at the time wasn't really branded. When we started in 2015, it was medical and Oregon was the second state to legalize and there wasn't a whole lot of creativity and artistic touch and aesthetics weren't that important. And so we really saw that we could bring our expertise from being in fashion and Harlee’s photography and our flair and our color.

How do you approach the designs and branding of the clients that you work with?

HC: With our own products and the things that we get to have our own flair on, we always talk as a team and we're really into what we're into at the moment — if all of us are like, ‘Oh my God, we're loving this ’80s style,’ we want to lean into it, we really work as a team when it comes to our actual products.

With our other clients, we take their input and I really strive to pull the most interesting and creative things that people want out of them because sometimes people want to play it safe a little bit just because they're scared and I really think that our team helps people see how to do things in a more colorful light.

JD: I feel like people come to us too because they know our aesthetic. Harlee and Keasha [social media manager and creative assistant] are just stepping their game up, day after day. A lot of people outside of cannabis are starting to come to us. It's cool to see that other people in other industries like what we're up to.

How did Lady Jays come about?

JD: We were working with so many other cannabis brands and doing photography for other companies and people just kept putting it in our ear that we should come out with our own line. We all smoke flower mostly, and so joints are the main way that we consume cannabis. So many people have helped us out in the industry too which is really awesome and just given us the ideas. We just had a lot of funnels and outlets and so we came up with a pre-roll pack because we just thought that it was so convenient to have several joints. They were half grams, which a lot of people really like and what we like because we don't smoke full grams because you just kind of smoke some of it and put it out for later. It's never good.

HC: And there’s no plastic, which was really important for us. The doob tubes just seemed so crazy — every time you’re just gonna have this plastic that’s going to be here forever? That’s not going to be us.

JD: We all had a team meeting and at that time we brought on Alisha, our graphic designer who designed the box and that was her first project. We wanted to market towards women so Lady Jays is like a collaborative thing that we came up with and we had lots of runs of edits — we wanted to do like a Miami Vice style, pinks and blues. We're just super stoked on how it ended up and we have all these other color variations of boxes that we want to come out with.

What do you see for the future of cannabis?

JD: Everyone's talking about what national legalization looks like and obviously that's in our future and with that there's the social equity aspect and not having big money come in, Big Pharma buyout all these small businesses that have worked so hard to be where we're at.

I think that making our mark on the industry now is just kind of setting us up for the future and that's what we're actually using our hemp CBD and CBG Lady Jays for, to get into states where cannabis isn't legal yet. And just spread the Lady Jays word and hopefully when national legalization comes around, people will know who we are and we'll just sell all over the world — the U.S. at least.

HC: I feel like people are really standing up for themselves these days, and saying ‘No, we don't just want these rich white men to be like in control of everything. We're going to stand together, we're gonna put people of color and women in the front and running businesses and support those people.’ So I really think that there's some good big change coming.

Stay tuned for upcoming launches from Ladies of Paradise, which is planning on launching an edible line called Venus Electra in March 2021.

This interview was edited for concision and clarity.

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kirby𖤐 @bloodbelt

getting high getting high with guys with girls

Can empirically confirm that men think the bonds of friendship are formed by smoking together and sitting in the same space for more than 3 hours in silence.