Katie Motta, CEO of Jade Stone & Alluring Media Co. – Interview Series

Several years into the lifespan of the U.S. cannabis industry, its advertising and marketing landscape remains both dynamic and largely uncharted. With an influx of diverse brands, distinct messaging, and rapidly evolving customer demographics, marketing strategies vary widely in both approach and overall success.

To better understand cannabis advertising and the art of building a brand that appeals to these distinct audiences, mycannabis.com spoke with Katie Motta, CEO of Jade Stone & Alluring Media Co.

What were the most useful lessons in brand building, storytelling, and marketing that you learned while attending both the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology?

Throughout my time at both schools, I was pursuing a degree in photography with the goal of becoming a product and fashion photographer. You’d think those skills wouldn’t transfer to where my career is focused now, but the art principles I absorbed at both colleges carry through to everything we do at Jade Stone today.

MassArt was where I learned the deeper emotional language of art. We studied the psychology of human perception and why every small decision in a piece of work lands differently for different people. Why that color? Why that lighting? Why did their face turn in toward the frame instead of out? Nothing was surface level, and that trained me to consider every element in terms of the story it tells, which is exactly how I approach every branding decision today.

FIT took a more commercial lens. Where MassArt was more focused on creating emotional art, FIT was about how to actually make a living doing creative work. They taught us how to promote our work, build a network, and position ourselves in an oversaturated market. It was more focused on the business of art, and that perspective was just as foundational as anything I learned in studio.

Together they made me who I am. I’ve always been artsy, but I always wanted to make it a career and not just a hobby.

What student organizations were you involved with? How did those organizations prepare you for your career and provide you with stronger teamwork and team management skills?

The student organizations I was most involved in were my collegiate sports teams at both schools. I’ve been a swimmer my whole life since I had my first swim lesson at just 1 year old, and was on the swim team from middle school through college, alongside other collegiate sports like basketball and rugby. I was also a member of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society at FIT, but, I was much more involved in sports than clubs.

Particularly with swimming though, that’s where I learned the most about accountability in your individual role to promote a team’s overall goals. Yes, you’re part of a larger team, but you’re swimming your own race when you’re in the water. In order to advance your team’s score, you are responsible for your own part, which is much like how I work with my design team today. We’re all advancing toward a common goal, but each of us has our own lane to swim in every day. As long as everyone is taking accountability for their part, we all succeed.

I always consider myself a team captain versus a team leader, and actually just recently discussed this viewpoint on the Leadership ThinkTank with the Women’s Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. I believe the “team captain” is someone who is more empathetic to the challenges of their team because they’re actually in it doing the work alongside them. That’s always been my approach at Jade Stone, and sports were a huge part of shaping that in me from a young age.

What inspired you to create Alluring Media Co.? What gaps in marketing/brand-building services for beauty and wellness brands did you hope to fill with the company?

Alluring Media Co. was born out of COVID. In 2021 I had lost all of my in-person photography work and started freelancing in social media and marketing. That’s when I noticed something: local brick and mortar businesses that had always relied on foot traffic and word of mouth were suddenly invisible. They needed to exist digitally, and fast.

So I created Alluring Media Co. to help them get there, building their Google Business profiles, social media accounts, and websites. But almost immediately I ran into the same problem over and over. One of my early clients was a hair salon owner who needed a website, but when we sat down to build it, she didn’t have a logo file, a color palette, or any digital assets at all. She had a sign on her building and years of customers. That was it. We ended up building her color palette, recreating her logo files, and putting together a full icon suite before we could even touch the website.

That kept happening. People knew they needed a web presence but didn’t understand that a brand system had to come first. So we shifted. Instead of leading with websites, we started leading with brand identity and built everything else from there.

The gap I kept seeing in beauty and wellness specifically was that indie brands were all building themselves on Canva. Same templates, same fonts, same general aesthetic. In such a crowded market, looking like everyone else isn’t just a design problem, it’s a business problem. These brands had real personalities and real stories, they just needed someone to come in and actually build something distinct for them that would be strategic enough to last. That’s where we came in.

I looked to the beauty and wellness industry particularly because those were the brands I found most interesting to work on. I thrive on creating something new in a crowded space, and beauty and wellness gave me room to do that at a more elevated level.

From there it grew into what it is today: a full-service brand strategy and design agency that brings the strategy into the design, with the same white glove service and attention to detail from day one.

What initial professional concerns did you have about founding a branding agency serving cannabis brands? Did the only partial legality of cannabis cause you to have any reservations about working with those brands?

Honestly, my biggest initial concern wasn’t legal at all. It was personal. I grew up in a household that was deeply anti-cannabis. My parents were raised during the war on drugs era, and that shaped everything I was taught about the industry growing up. I also had a bad experience with an edible in college that didn’t exactly help.

So when I got my first cannabis client request, a female-forward rolling paper brand, I was upfront with the client immediately. I told him I didn’t have much experience in the space personally or professionally. He didn’t care. He was adamant that our vision, our team, and our professionalism were the right fit, and that belief pushed me to do the work.

I started researching. I started talking to people in the industry. And what I found was that almost everything I had been taught growing up wasn’t true. These weren’t the people I had been warned about. They were cancer patients, people managing anxiety and sleep issues, creative entrepreneurs, and advocates. Productive, passionate members of society building something real. That’s not to say there aren’t bad players, because there are, but that’s true of every industry.

Once I understood who the people of cannabis actually were, I knew I wanted to make an impact. And we focused that impact on design that catered to people like me: wellness curious, design forward, and maybe a little skeptical at first, but open to cannabis. The designs that were currently on the market weren’t serving that niche, so that’s when I created Jade Stone.

On the legal side, the partial legality of cannabis has never been a significant reservation for me, and that comes down to one clear distinction: I am not plant touching. I’m a brand strategy and design agency. I create identities, packaging, and strategy. That puts me in roughly the same legal risk category as any other creative agency working in a regulated industry, and that risk is covered by the appropriate business and liability insurance. Where compliance does come into play is in the design work itself. State regulations around packaging, color usage, imagery, and anything that could appeal to minors are rules I take seriously, and those align naturally with how I approach design anyway. I know what my contracts cover, I vet who I work with carefully, and if something doesn’t feel right, I walk away.

How does Jane Stone “elevate” cannabis brands to become truly luxury, high-end brands? What marketing/branding strategies are most successful in building cannabis brands as far more luxury and higher-end than just a house brand?

Most cannabis branding is still surface level. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it’s not strategic. The industry has been stuck in a lowest-price-first mentality for a long time, and that’s been a real detriment to its growth. Elevating a cannabis brand means breaking out of that entirely, and it starts with understanding what high-end actually looks like in practice.

When a brand comes to us wanting to move upmarket, the first thing we look at is what they’re doing now. What does their sales strategy look like? How cohesive are their assets? Are they communicating product quality visually, not just through words? Most of the time the answer is no. So we come in and start with packaging, because that’s the one thing a customer can actually touch. The finishes you select, the feel of the material, the perceived value of holding something in your hands – all of that signals quality before a word is read.

From there we look at cohesiveness across all assets, because consistency signals trust subconsciously. We also look hard at language. If a brand is calling themselves “Premium Craft Cannabis,” they’ve already blended into the shelf. Word choice and written communication strategy are just as important as the visuals.

One of the bigger opportunities cannabis has been slow to adopt is the limited release and drop model. Collectible packaging, new drops, exclusive runs. These strategies have worked in fashion, spirits, and sneakers for decades. Cannabis is just now catching up, and the brands that move on it early will have a real advantage.

But here’s the thing: the packaging and the brand can only do so much. The product inside has to match. I always compare it to a house. If you have a stunning exterior, a manicured lawn and a beautiful facade, but the inside has cracked foundations and peeling wallpaper, you might get a guest to stay once, but they won’t come back.

The high-end cannabis brands that fail are the ones that dressed up the outside with nothing of substance inside. High-end doesn’t mean out of reach, it means the quality of every element, inside and out, justifies the price. You have to balance product quality with communication quality, or the whole thing falls apart.

What are some ways that providing marketing/branding services is unique to the cannabis industry? What are some challenging rules and regulations that you must abide by when working with cannabis brands that aren’t as strict as beauty and wellness brands?

From a design perspective, the regulations we navigate most often are around color and imagery. Many states restrict neon colors and anything that could be considered appealing to children, which aligns with how we design anyway. Beyond that, there are font size and styling requirements for compliance language to ensure it’s legible across different audiences, and we always design with those minimums built in from the start.

We also work closely with a packaging partner to handle child resistant certification for our clients, since CR compliance has to be built into the physical packaging itself. Potency labeling, warning language, and similar requirements are typically managed on the client side, but we design around them so nothing critical gets buried or overlooked.

State by state variation is also a consideration, and it does affect design decisions. We always ask clients upfront whether they plan to expand into other markets so we can build enough flexibility into the design to work across multiple states without a full overhaul every time.

On the marketing and copy side, you can’t make health claims, but that’s actually not unique to cannabis. Beauty and skincare brands navigate the same FDA restrictions around claims, and things like allergy statements and flammability warnings on perfumes and skincare are their own version of compliance. Cannabis isn’t as different from other regulated industries as people assume.

Where cannabis does stand apart on the marketing side is digital advertising and social media. Cannabis brands can’t run paid ads on most major platforms, and organic social comes with its own minefield of content policies that can get accounts flagged or removed without much warning. That means the brand itself has to work harder. The visual identity, the packaging, the in-store presence, and the organic content all have to carry more weight than they would for a beauty or wellness brand that can supplement with paid media. It actually raises the stakes for good branding, which is part of why we take the strategy side so seriously.

The one thing that’s also cannabis-specific and has no clean parallel elsewhere is the COA and dispensary label situation. There are no standardized rules for where those labels land on finished packaging, which means we can never fully predict what will get covered once a product hits a shelf. We do our best to anticipate it, leaving open areas or placing marketing language, rather than required information, in the zones most likely to be covered. It’s one of those things you just learn to design around, but it’s a real limitation that doesn’t exist in beauty or wellness the same way.

Through your experience with both Alluring Media and Jane Stone, what are some more effective ways that cannabis brands can successfully market to female consumers in particular? How are some cannabis brands and dispensaries alike currently missing those opportunities to appeal more to female customers?

Let me start with what’s not working, because it’s hard to talk about the opportunity without naming the problem directly. A lot of cannabis branding is gruff, aggressive, and male by default. The visuals lean street culture: slime drips, chains, graffiti, dark heavy color palettes. The written copy uses slang that doesn’t speak to a broad female audience. And the in-store experience at many dispensaries either feels like entering a dark club or a sterile medical office, neither of which is welcoming to someone who is wellness-curious and walking in for the first time.

The budtender experience is its own issue. Most dispensary staff aren’t trained on women’s specific concerns and needs, things like menopause symptoms, sleep issues, or anxiety, which are some of the most common reasons women are exploring cannabis right now. That’s a massive missed opportunity sitting right at the point of sale.

So what does work? It starts with story and emotional resonance. Female consumers, especially those who are new to cannabis or wellness-curious, want to understand a brand’s “why”. Not just what’s in the product, but why the brand was created, what it stands for, and whether it reflects their own values and lifestyle. Lifestyle imagery matters here too. Women want to see themselves in the way a product is presented. Does it fit into their actual life or their aspirations? That’s the question every visual decision should be answering.

Consumer education is also underutilized in cannabis, and it’s something the beauty industry has already figured out. Ingredient transparency and formulation storytelling are driving purchasing decisions in skincare and wellness right now. Cannabis is complex and that complexity creates anxiety for new consumers. Brands that take the time to demystify their products in an approachable, non-condescending way will earn trust faster than those who don’t.

The physical environment also matters just as much as the digital one. Dispensaries that want to welcome female consumers need to think about warmth, brightness, and approachability across every touchpoint, from the lighting to how budtenders are trained to communicate. Consistency between the brand someone sees online and the experience they have in store is what creates a loyal customer.

That said, not all women want the same thing. Heavy cannabis consumers who have been in the space for years often gravitate toward the edgier, counterculture branding that dominates the market right now. The bigger opportunity is the canna-curious consumer, the woman who is open to cannabis but needs it to feel familiar and normalized before she’ll commit. The more cannabis branding can look and feel like the wellness and beauty products she already trusts, without losing its creativity or shelf presence, the faster we destigmatize the category and grow the overall market.

And through all of it, one thing the industry needs to avoid: don’t let the pink tax bleed over into cannabis. Slapping a pink label on a product and charging more for it isn’t female-forward branding. Women don’t need their own version of the same product at a higher price point. They need brands that were actually built with them in mind from the start.

How do you think a federal cannabis rescheduling would change the duties of Jane Stone and the services that the company offers? Simultaneously, how would such a sweeping impact change the needs of your cannabis clients?

Rescheduling would be a significant shift for cannabis businesses, but honestly not much of a shift for how Jade Stone operates because we’ve already been working as if it were coming. The way we work doesn’t change because we’re already preparing clients for that future today.

From the day I launched Jade Stone, we’ve treated every brand we build as if federal legality is right around the corner. That means strongly recommending a federal trademark search with a lawyer and searching for the brand name across other states before anything is finalized. It means building every brand system to be expansion-ready from the start, so when a client is ready to grow, the foundation is already there. And it means positioning every client to speak to the audience that destigmatization will continue to grow: the wellness-curious consumer, the older consumer, the female consumer who is trend and aesthetic driven.

For our clients and other plant-touching brands, the most immediate relief would be financial. Removing the 280E tax burden means operators who have been paying taxes on gross revenue with no ability to deduct standard business expenses would finally have real budget to reinvest in their businesses, including the branding they had to piecemeal together the first time around. A federal framework would also simplify the state-by-state regulatory patchwork they currently navigate, and eventually open the door to selling across state lines, which is a massive opportunity for brands thinking about expansion.

That said, I think we’ll see an influx of brands looking for redesign help. Right now, we’re roughly 50/50 between building brands from scratch and rebranding existing ones. Once rescheduling happens and operators have more financial breathing room, we’ll see a shift toward rebranding and branding consolidation. A lot of brands were built quickly for a single-state market without thinking about federal compliance, trademark protection, or expansion readiness. With 280E gone and interstate commerce on the horizon, they’ll finally have both the need and the budget to do it right. The clients we’ve already built with that future in mind will be ahead. Everyone else will be catching up, and we’ll be ready for them.

Thank you for joining us, Katie! For more information on Jade Stone, please visit its website. Alluring Media Co.’s website can be found here.