Welcome to our first “Sundays With” series, where we profile people in cannabis and creatives who use it to do what they do best. Join us as we follow these people through what a Sunday looks like for them and showcase how they embody “Feel Good.”
Meet Marta Freedman, a bicoastal social media savant and creative to her very core. Whether it’s shooting content on the fly or showing up at an event with boxes-on-boxes of pizza, Marta’s someone who’s always out there meeting people. She’s the cofounder of the educational, highly creative, and aesthetically pleasing company, Nice Paper.
We meet up at Kreation in West Hollywood, a spot that Marta tries to hit up on both her easy going Sundays as well as most other days of the week. Currently, she spends half her time in New York City where her business partner Charlotte lives, and the other half in Los Angeles where the cannabis industry is booming. Marta tells us more about her company.
“Nice Paper is a media and education platform, and a community of people.”
The focus is on cannabis and the desire to be a resource for people to learn more about the plant and its products. More importantly, Marta says that Nice Paper is about building a community of people who want to come together and learn, smoke, and maybe eat some pizza.
To really tell the story of how Marta fell into the world of cannabis media and education, we first have to start with pizza.
If you haven’t heard of Marta Freedman before, then maybe you’ve heard of the Instagram account @hotgirlseatingpizza. If you’re unaware of this internet phenomenon, look it up — it was started by Marta with the desire to meet women that inspire her.
As we said, Marta’s a creative through and through. She doesn’t just get someone’s contact information and ask them to grab a cup of coffee. She creates a social media account, gains traction and direct messages people that she finds intriguing.
“I always intended to use it as a way to meet people I admire.”
She would contact someone and ask to take them on a pizza date with the sole purpose to get to know them. She said, “It’s not as intimidating as a coffee date, and it’s so interesting and weird everyone’s like yea I’ll meet you for pizza.”
Starting the account 6 years ago, Marta began hitting up her friends in the music industry and would ask if she could shoot with the artist if she brought pizza. That began to snowball. She started shooting with editors from major publications, women of notoriety in all fields such as NastyGal’s former CEO Sophia Amoruso, and was herself included in Rolling Stones’ 100 Best Instagram Accounts.
We had to ask — why just focus on women?
“I just wanted to highlight people I admired and at the time that was really only women.”
Beyond everyone she’s showcased, Marta was able to throw pizza parties for brands, making money by bringing her connections together and have a local pizza joint provide the pies.
But besides making money, this gave her credibility to ask people to meet up and build the relationships she has today — and she got a ton of free pizza in the process.
Through all the hype around pizza, Marta met her partner in crime Charlotte on a pizza date, who was writing a piece for Cosmo doing a “pizza cleanse,” which apparently means eating pizza everyday for a week. Sign us up!
But what’s the tie to cannabis? Marta, while a fan of pizza parties, is not a fan of your regular old birthday dinner. So how do you spice up a birthday dinner where you’re sitting next to that rando at the table? Offer everyone infused edibles to start the meal. Charlotte was at one of these dinners and told Marta she needed to get into the cannabis space.
On July 1st, the two had a smoking brainstorm, and on July 4th they formed Nice Paper. By November, Marta had quit her day job and was focusing on Nice Paper full time.
It’s no mystery that Marta is a doer and a maker. She’s got about 30 instagram accounts — one that’s all about malls, which she told us as she brought us to one of her favorite malls, The Grove.
She tells us that you never know where a good idea will come from, so you might as well just give it a shot. “If there’s a domain you like, it’s probably 20 bucks so just do it.” And she’s not stopping with her own ambitions.
She says her pet peeve is when reactive people don’t execute on their ideas and complain when another person beats them to the punch.
“If you have an idea, it’s just a thought unless you do something with it. Tying it back, weed helps.”
We end our day not over a slice of pizza but at a Los Angeles local spot, The Bigg Chill. This is one of those places you only hear about if you’re a native Angeleno, but East Coaster Marta of course knows about this place — thanks to someone she met at a pizza party.
Marta left us with one constant: whether it’s over pizza or a pre-roll, enjoy it with someone that inspires you.
Until next time…
