Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, A Thing or Two Podcast

Ellen Scanlon (00:00):

This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

Ellen Scanlon (00:07):

Welcome to How to Do the Pot, a podcast demystifying cannabis for women. I’m Ellen Scanlon. This whole series is dedicated to women sharing their stories, because buying your own weed can feel a little overwhelming and doesn’t having a friend along always make you feel better? The women in this series have been so generous to share their stories with us. Some were psyched, some were scared, some were kind of in shock, and everyone had questions.

Ellen Scanlon (00:38):

I hope that hearing how they did it helps you feel more confident when you’re ready to go shopping for cannabis. And we would love to hear your story. Just send a voice memo with your three to five-minute story to hi@dothepot.com. That’s H-I@dothepot.com.

Ellen Scanlon (00:58):

Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo are the New York based hosts of A Thing or Two podcast and the creators of the A Thing or Two newsletter. They are serial entrepreneurs, and I’ve been getting emails from their different businesses for seriously, the last 10 years. And after all these years of `feeling like I know them, I’m really happy to have them on the show to share their story.

Speaker 2 (01:24):

So we were in Denver in June of 2017, and we were actually interviewing business partners for a book we wrote called Work Wife, about the power of female friendship to forge successful businesses.

Speaker 3 (01:37):

Yeah, and we were interviewing Barb Diner and Deb Baker, the co-founders of Higher Standard Packaging. These two women who had had previous careers, had been friends for years, they retired and then started this eco-friendly cannabis packaging company.

Speaker 2 (01:55):

They’re so compelling. They’re so charming. They met on a St Patrick’s Day parade float in their 20s. And they were in their 50s and early 60s, I think, at the time. We were like fast friends with them. And at the end of this interview, they were like, “Can we take you to some of our favorite dispensaries?” And we were like, “Absolutely. How could we say no?”.

Speaker 3 (02:15):

It hadn’t even occurred to me-

Speaker 2 (02:15):

No, me either.

Speaker 3 (02:17):

… that that’s what we would do next. And it was really kind of them to be like, “Let us help you navigate this.”

Speaker 2 (02:22):

Totally. And they obviously knew all the people there because they were in that space, which was really charming. We had a friend, Jeremy Goldstein, who had moved out to Denver, sort of at the start of the legal cannabis boom, who had started a company called Ripple. And now also has a CBD-only company called Caliper. So we were texting him being like, “What should we buy? What do we do?”

Speaker 3 (02:44):

“Where do we go?”

Speaker 2 (02:45):

It felt like we had real insider info for this first outing, like real, I don’t know, personal connections to people involved.

Speaker 3 (02:55):

That’s right. I remember we had to get cash at the ATMs outside because it was one of these situations, I think maybe you could only pay cash or something else. And it was one of those situations where there’s a room you have to go in before you can get in the thing. It all felt very high security and sort of intense, but they were really nice dispensaries with very helpful people who did not make you feel like you didn’t know what you were doing. Because I assume also there’s a lot of tourists at that point in Denver who were there exclusively to get cannabis.

Speaker 3 (03:23):

And yeah, I would say it was a pretty good experience and we definitely were trying to figure out what to get, how to take it back with us.

Speaker 2 (03:32):

All of that.

Speaker 3 (03:33):

Jeremy’s product, Ripple, was what I would say was like the runaway hit of that hall. It’s a powder and you can put it in your coffee. You can put it in drinks and you could eat it like a Pixy stick, I guess. But I remember I brought it back for friends for a 4th of July weekend and everybody was drinking it in their coffee and was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” Like mellow high, but with the buzz of coffee, and truly delightful.

Speaker 2 (03:55):

It just felt really nurturing to have these mother ducks walking us through this whole experience too. And it felt nice to be going with women, I don’t know, to have that be our entree.

Speaker 3 (04:08):

So true.

Speaker 2 (04:09):

Anyway, would do it again.

Ellen Scanlon (04:14):

Thanks for listening to this episode of How to Do the Pot. If you’d like to share your story about the first time you bought legal weed, please send a voice memo to hi@dothepot.com or DM us @dothepot. For lots more information and past episodes, visit dothepot.com. And that’s also where you can sign up for How to Do the Pot’s newsletter, which comes out every other Friday. If you like How to Do the Pot, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. Thank you to our producers Madi Fair and Nick Patri. I’m Ellen Scanlon, and stay tuned for more of How to Do the Pot.