We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bailey / Jahna Weickum / Martell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Bailey / Jahna, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the toughest things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?

As a hemp/ CBD brand one of the largest ongoing issues that we face is all the regulation around marketing. It really makes it difficult in our niche to reach new customers. For context, we are not allowed to discuss in detail what CBD actually does, and we are not allowed to do targeted marketing in the traditional channels like google, facebook, or instagram. That combination makes it very difficult to share the power of this amazing plant. This was not an issue we were aware of when we started this business, but it quickly became a major pain point. We have watch lots of businesses, (bigger than ours) have their account shut down by instagram, and we knew that with a new company something like that could be a huge setback.

It has forced us to get creative in our marketing efforts, we have leaned into building an in-person community to combat the digital red tape. We rely heavily on in person pop-ups, classes, and happy hours to create one-to-one opportunities to discuss how the plant works, how it can bring relief to the things that weigh on our daily lives, and how it can be used for leisure.

Every month we host an ‘All Bodies’ dosed yoga series where we give free CBD to all attendees to enjoy during the class and then after we have an open dialog about CBD and how it can aid in your practice, and daily rituals. It has been a wonderful way for us to reach people, and allow them to ask questions and all grow and learn our understanding together.

Bailey / Jahna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are Bailey Weickum & Jahna Martell, and we are the babes behind Redeemer Small Batch. We are a family grown & women owned CBD and lifestyle brand based deep in the heart of Austin, TX. Our family grows hemp in Colorado and we make a line of vegan and organic CBD products from their harvests. We use a patented zero solvent extraction process to make our oil– which means we are introducing zero chemicals.

My (Bailey) family started growing hemp about 6 years ago and being generational farmers didn’t really have the desire or bandwidth to take on the retail and distribution side of things. My uncle came to me with the idea, and said if we were interested, that the opportunity was wide open for us to work together. Jahna and I fell in love about 10 years ago, and knew that eventually we wanted to start a business together, we didn’t know what that would be or have a timeline, but sometimes an opportunity finds you and you have to run with it. We started researching heavily, and experimenting with the hemp in our daily lives. After having incredible experiences of our own, finding relief from arthritis, anxiety, and trouble sleeping we knew that this was something we wanted to share with as many people as we possibly could.

So we got to work, we got a small loan from Beth, (Bailey’s Mom, our investing partner) and started creating the CBD brand that represented us. Our industry is a sea of green where it’s very rare to find a women & LGBTQ owned brand, and there were very few brands out there where we saw ourselves reflected.

Jahna, who we call our Head Brand Tender began our design and branding journey. She oversees our branding, design, and marketing efforts. Jahna is a Copywriter by trade, and self-taught designer. Along the way we have had help from our talented designer friends Monica Griffin, and Brand Patrick, (of Holler Greeting), and James Madison Mitchell. We have always thought of Redeemer as a creative brand, and want the branding to reflect that. We work with a collective of artists to keep Redeemer looking fresh, and to give it a collaborative feel. We have always been focused on building a community around Redeemer and that includes our branding initiatives.

Bailey, who we call our Head Batch in Charge takes care of the operational side of things. She oversees day to day operations, collaboration with the farm, events, and community building. She has build our wholesale program, creates the safe haven that people experience at our Neighborhood Shop.

When we started this company, we knew sustainability needed to be a primary focus all the way through, from our compostable packaging, to the way we grow. We launched in 2020, about a month before the pandemic hit here in Austin, it was not an easy time to start a company to say the least. Over the past 4 years we have grown from a tiny e-commerce brand, to a brick and mortar and we couldn’t be more proud. We have focused heavily on creating lasting partnerships, and our brick and mortar space is no exception. This opportunity came from a collaborative effort with The Future Front, (who we attribute so much of our early success to,) and The Little Gay Shop. The three of us share a building on the corner of 12th and Chicon at 1900 & 1902 East 12th St. The Future Front runs a creative community space, whose goal is to continue creating opportunities for artists and creatives, funding community cultural events, developing community-building educational resources, offering subsidized access to space & nurturing free, public arts programming. The Little Gay Shop is a queer marketplace selling art, apparel, books, magazines and much more from exclusively queer artists. Through our collective efforts we are hoping to build a neighborhood community space for all.

At our heart we are a high quality leisure brand that specializes in slow pleasures, which we consider to be disengaging from our digital albatross and engaging with ourselves, others, and the earth.

These are the promises we provide to our customers-

Quality & Transparency: Our customers can count on our quality always being in the top tier of products. This is paired with transparency about our practices, our ingredients, and our testing. They will always know where their CBD comes from, how it’s made, and whats in it. There is not enough transparency in our industry and it leads to a sea of questionable, and unsafe products. That will never be the case at Redeemer.

Connection: We guarantee them the opposite of the inaccessible, anxiety inducing, grow bro environment that can be found in most head shops and dispensaries. We are welcoming, knowledgeable, and truly care about matching people with the product that is right for them. They leave not only with a product, but with deeper understanding of how CBD can help them, and a place to turn if they have questions along the way.

Experience: Whether its a pop-up, a take over, or the shop, we try to provide them with a unique and memorable experience.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

We love to say– we fell in love, and the rest is CBD <3

Jahna and I met almost 10 years ago through a mutual friend and that was it for both of us. I (Bailey) lived in Portland, OR at the time, and Jahna was a life time Austinite. Things got serious, so I moved to Austin, and we’ve been growing in love ever since. I (Bailey) come from a family of entrepreneurs on my mother’s side, and Jahna has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. We both knew we wanted to eventually start a business of our own, I don’t think we would have ever thought it was this. But we couldn’t be happier with how things came together. Obviously running a business and being partners can be difficult to balance at times, but we both are all in all the time and are so excited for our growth as partners in both respects.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We didn’t have any plans to start a business when this opportunity came, so had no finance plans, and with all the red tape with banks and hemp/ cannabis brands we knew that start-up money wasn’t something we could rely on in a big way.

We started this business with an $8,000 investment from Beth, Bailey’s mom, and a lot of grit and creativity. We have since made other small injections when we could, but we have grown sustainably with Redeemer predominantly funding it’s own growth.

Contact Info:

• Website: redeemersmallbatch.com
• Instagram: @redeemersmallbatch
• Facebook: facebook.com/redeemersmallbatch
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/redeemer-small-batch/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/redeemer-small-batch-austin

Image Credits
Ashley Posthuma (Gummy image)