We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madlyne Kelly. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madlyne below.

Hi Madlyne, thanks for joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

There are so many articles about “Top 5 habits of highly successful people” but if we break that down, they’re already successful. They have childcare paid for, meal help from a nutritionist or delivery service, a gym membership and enough money and time to reinvest in themselves.

I think what it takes to be successful is actually slowing the hell down. We’re living through a time when hustle culture is praised, but burnout is rampant. We can’t expect ourselves to keep up with the demands of entrepreneurship in an exploitative market.

When each day is an uphill battle – especially being queer & woman owned in the cannabis space – energy conservation vastly outweighs the amount of shit you were able to check off your to-do list when looking at the long term.

Madlyne, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Madlyne Kelly, I’m one of the owners of Irie Weddings & Events. We’re the nation’s largest mobile cannabis bartending business and we provide social cannabis consumption oversight at events to ensure guests are having fun in a paced and moderated way.

I started my career in the cannabis space at the Colorado Medical Marijuana Registry and after taking their system into the digital world, my business partners and I joined forces to bring responsible cannabis service to events in multiple states. We focus on small servings, education and guest comfort.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When we first started Irie, we were providing planning, floral and coordination services in addition to the cannabis bars. This made hiring staff next to impossible, searching for unicorns like us who could do it all. But our expectations of others and ourselves had to change.

In order to be our best selves for our clients, we decided to focus on our most popular service; the cannabis bar. After building a reputation for planning cannabis florals – even having Netflix make fun of us for it – it took some time to curate the brand image that reflected our flagship service and inform press.

This pivot was instrumental in our scalability and without it, there’s no way we’d be where we are today.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Being an ancillary cannabis business means we face a plethora of advertising restrictions. One night we decided to post a video of the bar (no smoking happening) on TikTok, thinking it looked nice and couldn’t possibly be harmful. Nor did we anticipate a lot of views as it was our first one.

We woke up the next morning and and it had gone viral. Over 5 million views, thousands of shares and comments. It was an incredibly exciting day. 48 hours later it was taken down and my business partners’ account was suspended temporarily.

While being taken down wasn’t ideal, this gave us insight into what can happen in a world where we can freely advertise our safety and education based services.

Contact Info:

• Website: irieweddingsandevents.com
• Instagram: @irieweddingsandevents.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/irieweddingsandevents
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/irieweddingsandevents

Image Credits
Dog Daze Photography