DTC POD - #257 - Stefany Nieto, Gwella & Mojo: Building For The Upcoming Psychedelic CPG Boom

DTC POD #257 - Stefany Nieto, Gwella & Mojo: Building For The Upcoming Psychedelic CPG Boom

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Blaine Bolus 00:00:49 - 00:01:02

What's up, DTC pod? Today we're joined by Stephanie Nieto, who is the founder and CEO of Guella. So, Stephanie, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about Gwella Mojo and all the stuff you guys are up to.

Stefany Nieto 00:01:02 - 00:01:21

Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. So Guella is our parent company. It's more of the editorial content where we provide trip supplies, well, trip support tools as well as guides. While Mojo is our flagship product, our functional mushroom gummies that elevate mood, focus and energy for five plus hours.

Blaine Bolus 00:01:21 - 00:02:03

Awesome. So yeah, we're really excited for this episode because I feel like the psychedelic sort of space is becoming a really interesting hot topic. I know there's been a whole bunch of research around the space and obviously there's natural pairing with editorial content, CPG, all this sort of stuff. So why don't you, for our listeners who may not be so familiar, why don't you just give us a landscape of what functional mushrooms are, what research is maybe going on that hasn't passed or maybe will pass in the future? Just what the current state of affairs and what all the hype around mushrooms, functional mushrooms, normal mushrooms, not normal mushrooms are.

Stefany Nieto 00:02:04 - 00:02:40

Yeah, I like to think of it as the psychedelic renaissance. Like it's coming back. It's not that it hasn't happened in the past, but I think it got a resurgence due to the Pandemic. People couldn't travel abroad and so they traveled within. And so really Psychedelics kind of popped off because of it. And as a result of psychedelics becoming more popular, so did functional mushrooms. So of course, psychedelic mushrooms, they tend to have hallucinogenic effects, while functional mushrooms typically will not. Functional mushrooms are more adaptogenic in nature.

Stefany Nieto 00:02:40 - 00:03:24

So typically, they will target different parts of your body and improve it. Depending on either the individual mushroom itself or depending on the adaptogenic properties, they will basically find areas of improvement within you and work on improving them. And so that can be anything like energy, focus, mood, sleep, anxiety, like your sex life. It can be so many different things. There's thousands on thousands of different mushrooms out there. And as the pandemic kind of took off and people were looking for ways to not explore themselves, both through psychedelics and otherwise, adaptogenic, functional mushrooms really found their place in improving people's day to day life, as well as providing them with support in terms of their immunity.

Blaine Bolus 00:03:24 - 00:03:35

Got it. And why don't you give us a little background about yourself? How did you end up in this ROle? How did you end up getting so excited about the space? Why don't you just tell us a little bit about your own background, for sure?

Stefany Nieto 00:03:35 - 00:04:15

So I actually used to build greenhouses in the Arctic, completely Different world. And I did that for about eight years. And then the Pandemic hit, and I realized this thing that I had built and Loved, and It was my baby. And basically my personality wasn't Necessarily who I was Anymore. And that was hard. That was Hard to come to terms with. And so I took some Time to really just Understand where I wanted to go, who I wanted to Be, who was I? Beyond my company, which I think entrepreneurs can definitely struggle with. And, well, it was actually friends of mine that brought up the fact that I love drugs.