Kayla Weed
Kayla WeedStory Cannabis senior marketing manager
STORYTELLER | Marketing manager Kayla Weed has now worked with three major multistate operators, giving her a wide range of experience and the ability to wear multiple hats for her current company, Story.
Kayla Weed has seen a lot of rapid changes in the past four years, even by cannabis industry standards. The 31-year-old senior marketing manager joined the industry in 2020 as a marketing coordinator for Harvest Health & Recreation during the company’s meteoric rise and eventual $2.1 billion acquisition by Trulieve in 2021, before leaving Trulieve to join Story Cannabis alongside several of her former Harvest peers.
“The people that came over here to Story, we certainly didn’t come over here to have less stressful lives,” Weed says.
Weed started at Story Cannabis in 2023 and has helped the company launch its Just Flower and Fade Co brands along with the usual bevvy of responsibilities inherent with startup companies.
“I used to joke, ‘What hat am I wearing today? Do you need the digital marketing manager, the brand manager, retail manager, the customer service manager?’” she says. “I have been pretty good at being the organized person, because when you have a lot going on, you have to organize yourself, prioritize what hat you’re wearing to be able to produce to the standard that I like producing.
“You have to set the bar high for yourself.”
Story Cannabis has grown considerably since Weed first joined. In Arizona, where the company is headquartered, Story has expanded from three locations to 11 in a little more than a year. It’s a similar trajectory to what Harvest had during its heyday, but Weed says the company is not looking to repeat history.
She says Story CEO Jason Vedadi and chief operations officer Joe Sai have held firm in the approach of keeping Story a private company.
“There’s no fear that we are going to be something else next year,” she says. “None of us have that feeling.”
Prior to joining the cannabis industry, Weed spent eight years working in pharmaceuticals. While she jokingly says she “went from one drug to the next,” Weed quickly grew to hate the pharmaceutical industry for the ways it would gatekeep patients from vital medications and at the same time over-prescribe harmful, unnecessary ones. Though she describes her past career with noticeable acrimony, she says it gave her firsthand experience in working with highly regulated substances and government agencies.
For the majority of her life, Weed had been a regular consumer of cannabis, but never saw it as a potential career. But when she came across a post for a marketing position at Harvest, her distaste for the pharmaceutical industry’s harmful practices only fueled her passion to be a part of booming new legal industry.
“I could not believe it,” she says. “‘Hold the phone, you’re telling me I could be doing marketing for cannabis?’ I never wanted something more in my life.”