Mary Jane’s Medicinals | Our Origin Story—Part Two

An Idea is Born in the Woods, and a Brand is Born in the Kitchen

This is Part Two of a series on the origins of Mary Jane’s Medicinals and how the Colorado-based cannabis topicals company got its start in the southwest Colorado town of Telluride. If you haven’t yet read Part One, check it out here.

As luck would have it, I ended up practicing massage therapy in Telluride for six years. And in 2009, when the ski season finally died down, I decided to go out to Northern California to make some extra money trimming weed.

I had a Telluride friend who had moved out to California to help her boyfriend with his farm, and I joined a truckload of other “trimmigrants” for an epic, 28-hour drive to Trinity County in the far north.

After a few days there, unnaccustomed to the repetitive motion of trimming, I complained to my friend about a pain in my neck. When she offered to rub some cannabis-infused lotion on my neck I thought, “Why not?” So imagine my surprise when my neck muscles loosened up and I felt a legitimate release of tension almost immediately.

And suddenly my mind turned to my massage practice back in Colorado, which was then in the process of regulating its medical marijuana market.

“How might my massage clients benefit from this kind of infused lotion? And I wonder if you could make marijuana-infused oils—and salves, too?”

I kept thinking and planning and dreaming while living in a tent in the woods, trimming weed.

When I returned to Colorado, that inspiration had evolved into a full-blown obsession; And so I put my ideas and what I had learned into practice in my home kitchen, where I began infusing massage oil with cannabis to provide a more relaxing experience for my clients, many of whom suffered from chronic pain and other serious health issues.

To my surprise and delight, not only did my clients experience a deeper and more significant relaxation, but they also reported a substantial lessening of their pain, as well as the easing or reversal of other conditions. I set out on a research mission, to find out everything I could about cannabis, but there wasn’t a lot of scientific research at that time.

But based on what I was seeing with my clients, I knew that marijuana-infused topicals had a great deal of potential to help a lot of people.

And so I continued to mix and test small batches of infused oil in my kitchen to find the “recipe” that worked best. I tried the final products out on my clients, then basically went door to door. People asked, “Does it work?” And I would say, “Here’s a sample, try it out for yourself.”

I didn’t have any experience running a business—let alone an MBA—and I had to learn how to launch a company by just doing it.

But that’s a story for another time.

To be continued … 🙂