If You Can’t Find the Room, Build It
When Katie Pringle first entered the Canadian cannabis industry, she expected friction. New markets tend to come with rough edges. What caught her off guard was how familiar the imbalance felt. At early networking events, she often found herself as one of only two women in rooms filled with dozens of men, an incongruity for a sector that liked to position itself as progressive.
“When we started in cannabis, we were the only women in the room a lot of the time,” Pringle recalled. “I would go to a networking event and there’d be me and my former business partner in a space with 80 men.”
Rather than accept that dynamic, she decided to change it.
Today, Pringle is the founder of Radicle Femmes, one of the most influential women focused networking platforms in Canadian cannabis. The organization emerged from lived experience, professional frustration, and a clear-eyed assessment of what the industry still lacked.
From Television to Cannabis PR
Before cannabis, Pringle built her career in television, working in environments where women held authority and set the tone. At the time, she did not realize how formative that experience would be. The contrast became unavoidable when she later launched Marigold PR, now ten years old and cannabis focused from day one.
Public relations, she noted, is largely women led. Cannabis, particularly in its early legal years, was not. Women held a fraction of leadership roles, a number that still sits around 21% today. That gap sparked informal conversations at first, then small women in cannabis gatherings beginning as early as 2017. Radicle Femmes became the formal expression of that long-running impulse three years ago and scaled quickly because the demand was already there.
“Our tagline is, I can’t believe we still need these events,” Pringle said. “It’s a little snarky, a little cheeky, but it makes the point.”
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Networking That Leads Somewhere
Radicle Femmes distinguishes itself by intent. Events are designed to be warm, accessible, and structured, particularly for attendees who find traditional networking uncomfortable. Licensed producers, retailers, and regulators are brought into the same conversations, with time carved out for meaningful interaction.
Pringle measures success primarily by outcomes, eschewing metrics like attendance figures or sponsorship totals. She points to women who landed new jobs after making the right introduction, brands that expanded into new provinces after meeting regulatory stakeholders, and founders who moved stalled conversations forward because the connection happened face to face.
“At the end of the day, I’m really proud of creating something that is inspiring and fun to be a part of,” she said, “but also moves business forward for everyone that’s attending.”
Holding the Line on Authenticity
With her background in PR, Pringle is keenly aware of how quickly mission driven spaces can drift toward overcommercialization. Radicle Femmes aims to avoid that by choosing partners carefully and rejecting surface level gestures. She is candid about “pink washing,” the practice of repackaging marketing without genuine engagement.
The brands that resonate are those willing to show up with intention and respect for the audience. Sometimes that means thoughtful experiential design. Sometimes it simply means having the right people in the room, ready to listen, according to Pringle.