Jenn Tramaglino, Founder of Cannect Hospitality & Event Planner – Interview Series

For over two decades now, Jenn Tramaglino has been hosting significantly large scale events for nightlife and cannabis industry events as well as cannabis publishing with magazines such as DOPE. In 2018, she founded Cannect Hospitality, a multi-faceted company that both serves as a robust full-service marketing agency and event planning company. Most recently, her and the Cannect team organized the 420 State Fair at Nuwu in Las Vegas, a massively successful 420 event that brought back all the nostalgia for those who regularly attended their state fair such as myself.

How did you get started in event planning in general? What were the specific defining moments that made you decide to get into this exciting field? Your resume is quite extensive and spans over two decades now.  

I have always loved to create an experience, invite people to it, and then get to see them having so much fun. I think the first large party I threw was in 8th grade and I got to invite pretty much the entire class to my birthday party. There is something really magical about being able to give someone an invitation and make them feel special, included.

I got to live that over and over and over again during my time at The Light Group in the early 2000’s. My first job with the nightlife company was passing out flyers inside one of the casinos and inviting people into the bar. Pretty much a “club promoter” position. I LOVED doing this job and getting to walk around, talking to people and offering them free drinks or the coveted table seats in the venue.

Soon after my hiring, I had moved into the corporate office and because the company was still pretty new, everyone in the office shared duties related to creating and marketing the weekly events at each venue. This was the first time I took part in professionally planning real events. I was 21-22 years old and had zero experience doing the things I was tasked with doing but just kept saying “Yes!” every time they asked me to do a new job. Sure, I had young adult experience working in smaller restaurants and bars but absolutely nothing like this. My role over 10+ years evolved into ultimately overseeing development, marketing and operations as Chief of Staff for the company.

At the time, I don’t think anyone involved knew what an iconic moment in time that era of nightlife would come to be. Over the decade I worked with The Light Group, we opened nearly 30 venues and produced thousands and thousands of events.

I remember the first event I helped with the production on was the grand opening of FIX Restaurant at Bellagio. It was May of 2004. We made customized invitations, an embroidered napkin rolled up and a printed linen paper with the event information on it. The afterparty was at Light Nightclub, the most exclusive luxury nightclub in Las Vegas. The invite list had like 100 celebrities on it and I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I just got fired from a Ruby Tuesday 6 months ago and now I’m sending a nightclub invitation to Paris Hilton.”

Why did you decide to go into cannabis events in particular and what made you make that professional transition? Were there certain aspects of cannabis events that you found interesting?

I started leaning away from traditional entertainment and hospitality and leaning into the cannabis industry in 2016-2017. I had spent almost all of 2016 living in Amsterdam and that experience was life changing. Which sounds so cliche but, it was. I had been gifted a one-way ticket to London to see friends and ended up going to Amsterdam for a night, which turned into 3 weeks, which turned into 3 months, which turned into an immigration lawyer helping me establish a company there.

I was staying with one of my best friends from the US, who had already moved there. She introduced me to the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty. This treaty allowed me to start a business, so I could stay in the Netherlands legally and work as a hospitality consultant. One of the projects I immediately started on was a 420 Tour. Part of my self-appointed R&D was to visit every single cannabis tour, cannabis museum, cannabis coffee shop etc…that was being offered to visitors. This taste of getting to see cannabis interwoven in a society as both a lifestyle for the locals, and an offering to the tourism market felt like I had found the missing piece.

My time in Amsterdam was absolutely the main catalyst for wanting to parlay into the cannabis industry, but the means for the US transition was a mix of great timing and great friends. I returned back to Las Vegas at the end of 2016 for the holidays and had every intention of going back to Amsterdam. The Universe had other plans, and I wound up getting an introduction to the owners of DOPE Magazine by my amazing business partners.

DOPE was in the middle of an expansion and they were hiring for someone to launch the Nevada publication. I got the job and it was a blend of producing events, curating content for the magazine and networking with the local industry. I was actually supposed to be selling magazine ads too, but I was terrible at that, so we expanded the Vegas sales team and that allowed me to focus on other growth opportunities for DOPE in Nevada. I started traveling with the team to help produce events in other states and I got to be a part of hosting some legendary DOPE Cups, DOPE Industry Awards and of course, the infamous Las Vegas Golden Ticket Party.

Since then, I have been lucky enough to get to join forces with Dave Tran and James Z. now of Farechild Events, on many many incredible parties. We just got to create the 2024 420 State Fair together, and I have to say I’m already ready to start planning next year because it was that good!

When was Cannect Hospitality created and what services does the company offer? Also, how involved is Cannect with the opening and further marketing of the consumption lounges?

While I worked with DOPE Magazine throughout 2017, I started seeing an opening in the Nevada cannabis industry. There seemed to be room for an experienced hospitality developer to work on the opening of licensed cannabis consumption lounges. There was a lot of legislative work going on around me, organizations like Las Vegas NORML and WeCAN 702 were hosting events and during those events, talking about the work they were doing at the City, County and State levels. It seemed like cannabis lounges were going to be moving fast and I wanted to participate. Knowing that “fast” was going to still mean years, I decided to open a company that offered a few different services so we could operate while waiting for the laws to change.

Cannect Hospitality was founded in early 2018 by myself and our CFO and General Counsel, Aaron Soffer. We joined forces with Andrew Mieure of Top Shelf Budtending in 2019 and have since welcomed Arianna James and Shannon Dorn to the team. This core crew and an incredible group of contractors and service providers help make the magic happen. The services we offer range from; full service development of brands, venues or campaigns to marketing plans and media buying to event production. On behalf of our well-respected list of clients, we have produced lounge concepts, large scale marketing campaigns, trade show experiences, convention after parties, festival activations and more.

Currently in the lounge space, Cannect is accepting new clients who have consumption lounge licenses in Nevada or other states. Cannect Hospitality has an SOP package that is available to anyone who needs defined structure and compliant operational policies for their venue. We also love offering concept development services to help operators build an efficient, profitable, fun and safe experience for their guests.

What have been some of your highlights with Cannect Hospitality and your career as a whole?

Although nothing about running a cannabis business has been smooth or easy, running the business of Cannect has felt like one highlight after another. Truly, I mean that. The cannabis industry as a whole is so new, everything is the first time it’s being done. Every accomplishment feels HUGE.

We’ve had the opportunity to do so many things that I never imagined I would get to do. We have been fortunate enough to add the biggest cannabis companies in the world to our client list. We have helped legislative efforts and seen laws changed and new ones created due to our work. I’ve been lucky enough to get to travel all over the US and Europe working on projects.

I feel very accomplished in my career honestly, and am filled with gratitude for the opportunities I have been given and have created for myself. This is going to sound cheesy but I really am thankful for the help of my friends, family and mentors along the way. Anything I’ve ever done in my life, has only been possible because of the relationships, connections and support of the people around me.

Does the planning of cannabis events specifically come with any disadvantages or problems that traditional event planners normally wouldn’t have to deal with?

There are so many differences between hosting a traditional event vs. hosting a cannabis event. We can just talk about Nevada for now. First of all, the main issue is a lack of legal venues to host cannabis events in Nevada. Until the licensed consumption lounges started opening, the only place you could host a legal consumption event was on private property such as a residence. This reduced the amount of spaces available to nearly none. We are lucky to now have places like NuWu’s Sky High Lounge & Courtyard, Smoke & Mirrors at Thrive and DAZED at Planet 13 to host events at, while looking forward to more and more lounges opening.

If a Nevada State licensed cannabis establishment like a dispensary, cultivation or production wants to participate in a private cannabis consumption event, they have to submit an operations plan to the Cannabis Compliance Board for approval. Once the event is approved, we can then begin procurement of services and production items. These extra approval processes take time. Cannect is proud to say we created one of the very first fully approved event operations plans in Nevada.

Cannect strives for 100% compliance with our event planning, and we always have our guest safety in mind. Due to this ethos, our event budgets are typically not small. An example of a cannabis specific hurdle, is that we pull full insurance policies for the venues we host at, which are usually triple or quadruple the cost of a normal event insurance policy if not more. Every event has to go through a special quoting process and it extra takes time to get these policies into place as only a few providers offer coverage to the cannabis industry.

With cannabis being rescheduled to Schedule III, do you see that reform impacting cannabis-centric events and the operations of Cannect?

I am not going to pretend that I know what’s going to happen once cannabis is rescheduled. But I want to say that Cannect is going to ride out the wave and we’ll figure out what we need to do to stay in business once it happens. 7 years in the industry have gone by in the blink of an eye and we hope to get to be here for the long haul.