Rosie Mattio

Although she’d been working in public relations for nearly a decade, when Rosie Mattio moved to Seattle in 2013, just after Washington voters legalized adult-use marijuana, a light bulb went off.

“I saw what was happening in Seattle,” she says. “No one was really doing consumer lifestyle PR around cannabis.”

When Mattio was approached to do a crowdfunding campaign for a cannabis cookbook — a good match with her background in specialty food PR — and she found her mainstream media contacts excited to write about cannabis, so she jumped into the industry head-first. Today, Mattio Communications is based in New York City and is one of the largest cannabis marketing firms in the industry, boasting 40 clients, 39 of which are cannabis brands or ancillary products, including Headset, Canndescent, Papa & Barkley, Harborside and PAX, among others. As a full-service, cannabis-focused firm, Mattio also does not just provide PR, but social media, investor relations, content, and SEO.

By approaching cannabis marketing in the same way as any other product, Mattio was the first to place cannabis articles in such mainstream publications as Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine.

“Now they write about it quite often,” she says.

Mattio says her firm treats cannabis with the respect of a major industry and she tries to position the products like she would if they were launching a new popcorn or any other consumer packaged good.

Mattio Communications now employs 17 people, but Mattio says the company’s client base continues to grow and plans are to open offices in Toronto and Los Angeles by 2021. She’s proud of the work she and her firm have done in the cannabis space and says she “can’t imagine having more fun.”

“If you told me 10 years ago that my career would be CEO of a large cannabis company, I would have said ‘What are you talking about?’” she says. “But the more you learn about the plant and the more stories you hear about how positively it impacts people, you just become an advocate.”