SUSANNAH GROSSMAN
Founder & Director of Strategy
“It’s more about doing good than looking good. I don’t want to be the biggest name in the business, I want to be the best.”
As Verdant Communications’ founder and director of strategy, Susannah crafts messaging, pens narratives, and develops communication strategies designed to link cannabis entrepreneurs, companies, and products with the concepts and culture of connoisseurship. Working with diligence and intention behind the scenes, she helps bring the stories of these pioneering ventures to consumers across the country and beyond. It’s a job she was born to do. She’s been running with artistic spirits and creative rogues all her life.
A classically trained violinist with a lifelong passion for words, Susannah began her communications career on the East Coast leading successful media and marketing campaigns for lifestyle, hospitality, and travel ventures, working with major restaurant groups, advising James Beard Foundation Award-winning chefs, and launching national wine and spirit brands. She sensed a new opportunity when Colorado launched its legal adult-use marijuana industry in 2014. As a consumer herself – she uses plant-based medicine to manage a seizure disorder – she realized cannabis businesses needed ways to harness the mainstream media's and general public’s growing interest in the sector without playing to sensationalist coverage and stereotypes.
To help those businesses do so, Susannah became public relations director for Women Grow, the industry’s largest networking organization, in 2014. With international media attention from the likes of Cosmopolitan Germany and Elle France, during Susannah’s tenure the networking group dramatically shifted the conversation around women and cannabis. In 2015, Susannah moved to Colorado and launched Verdant, developing integrated communications programs for a select group of clients whose mission and vision she personally believes in. The result has been client coverage in the nation’s most influential media outlets, messaging that has become part of mainstream discourse, and 100-percent business growth year over year.
Susannah also serves as chief operating officer for Mountain Medicine, one of Colorado’s most established edibles producers. Overseeing the production and sales of these artisanal, hand-crafted goods, she’s developed unique insight into the critical operational, regulatory, and consumer market factors that shape cannabis businesses. (Plus, like everyone, she loves Mountain Medicine’s billy goat mascot.)
When she’s not working – which isn’t as often as she wishes – Susannah can be found escaping to the mountains or hosting dinner parties with her partner and their dog, surrounded by good friends, good wine, good music, and good cannabis. The stories of her singing late-night karaoke in Copenhagen with the kitchen staff of the best restaurant in the world might or might not be true.
JOEL WARNER
Director of Content Strategy
As Denver-based director of content strategy at Verdant Communications, Joel works with cannabis brands to bring their messaging and initiatives into focus for the audiences and on the platforms that matter most.
Joel has been writing professionally since landing a job out of college as a correspondent for The Boston Globe in 2001. After that, he moved to Colorado and worked for a variety of publications, eventually becoming a staff writer at the Denver alternative newsweekly Westword. It was there in 2009 that Joel began covering Colorado’s booming medical marijuana scene, launching the country’s first-ever dispensary critic position. He left Westword in 2011 to co-author a non-fiction book, The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014.
In 2014, Joel co- authored “Altered State,” an ongoing Slate column on the country’s first legal marijuana market in Colorado. That led International Business Times to hire him as its marijuana staff writer, making him among the first mainstream reporters covering the cannabis industry nationwide. Joel’s work there led to a Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, with judges noting, “It is clear that he has mastered his beat.” Joel’s writing, cannabis-related and otherwise, has also appeared in WIRED, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, Pacific Standard, 5280, Vice and Grantland, and his work has been honored by the likes of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, the Best American Sports Writing anthology, the Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, the National Awards for Education Reporting and the Magazine Awards of Western Publishing.
Joel leads Verdant’s content operations, helping clients craft their stories into powerful and absorbing narratives, both on and off the page. He takes the lead on all client written materials, plus uses his years of news-media experience to connect stories with the perfect outlets around the country.
When he’s not working, Joel can be found teaching writing courses and coordinating Hamilton singalong sessions with his family in Denver, Colorado. Thanks to the vagaries of the Internet, he’s considered to be one of the leading authorities on Casa Bonita, the outrageous Denver restaurant made famous by South Park.
JOHN TURNER
Design Consultant
“This is the biggest puzzle I’ve ever come across: How can I influence people’s opinions about cannabis through graphics?”
As design consultant at Verdant Communications, John brings cannabis brands to life with a designer's eye and a creative soul.
John has been an artist at heart ever since as a kid he obsessively studied the ads and illustrations in his copies of The Source and Rolling Stone. After graduating with a degree in fine arts from New York’s prestigious School of Visual Arts and doing design work for publishing interests, John began focusing his artistic talents on his other lifelong passion: music. Relying on everything from oil paints to calligraphy to pen and ink drawing, John was soon crafting album covers, T-shirts, logos, fashion lines, television commercials, animations, and murals for the likes of George Straight, Justin Timberlake, Kid Rock and many other musical greats. At the same time, he served as the creative lead in major cultural projects such as Americana Music Triangle tourism campaign and the grassroots effort to preserve and restore Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A.
More recently, John turned his attention to the cannabis industry. As skilled in paint glazes and color theory as he is in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, he works closely with Verdant’s clients to produce the perfect visual representations to match their products and passion. The result is vivid, one-of-a-kind design work that leaps off the shelf and the page, imagery that sings with the spirit and power of a well-crafted song.
When he’s not working, John can be found spending time with his family in a “reality distortion field of a town” in Tennessee. As strange as it sounds, he credits his big break to his appearance on The People’s Court to argue for his right to use a portrait he drew of Barack Obama. (He won.)