Grasslands Agency
September 16, 2024
This week on The Weedsmith, Grasslands’ series on modern cannabis leadership, associate producer of the Emerald Cup Taylor Blake talks about her experience having to move the largest cannabis competition in the world. The Weedsmith runs Tuesdays on Grasslands LinkedIn and Instagram pages.
Transcription:
Ricardo Baca:
You are listening to The Weedsmith, a show about modern cannabis leadership. Today I am thankful to be sitting across from Taylor Blake.
Can you tell us about one of your recent wins, or maybe one of the Emerald Cup’s recent wins? A time that could have either gone good or bad, it could have ended in disaster or triumph, but ultimately ended up in the "win" category.
Taylor Blake:
The most obvious one to me would be the decision for us to move from being a Mendocino-based event. We went to Garberville for one year and the turnout there was really great. We were at a super-small venue, the Mateel Community Center, and then we decided that we wanted to really expand to a fairground-sized event.
And at that point, that's a lot of risk that you're taking, because events are super-expensive. There's a lot of work that goes into it. There's no guarantee that people are going to come. We're also an event that takes place in December.
We’re an outside-mostly event so there's a lot of risks there, too, so, that first year that we made that jump, I think, really could have been, if it wasn't, you know, supported by the community, really disastrous for us because we weren't “event people," you know?
We were growers. We were growing at the time. We were more so cannabis-industry people that threw an event than event production people. So I think that that first jump to go to Santa Rosa was definitely the most kinda daring thing that we did and we didn’t have everything together by any means, but it turned out great for what we were doing at the time, and so that really just inspired us to keep going.
