Girl’s Joint, Back After Hiatus, Brings Femme Touch to Smoke Shop Market

What comes to mind when you picture your boilerplate smoke shop?

Neon-lit signage? Rows of glass casings? Aisles full of bongs? Dude behind the counter in dreadlocks or backwards trucker cap?

“They all look exactly the same, and you’re generally interacting with the same folks,” Mandi Cavano said. “And for us as women and femme-identifying individuals, it’s not a pleasant experience.”

That experience led Cavano, along with her business partner Judie Vegh, to open up The Girl’s Joint, a cannibis accessory boutique catering to feminine potsmokers and gummy indulgers.

Cavano and Vegh’s Gordon Square shop opened last November during an interesting time in Ohio cannabis culture. Recreational weed was legalized in 2023 but since then Gov. Mike DeWine has led something of a crackdown on edible manufacturers imitating candy brands—Nerds, Gushers, Skittles—that could be marketed to minors.

Yet, for the women at The Girl’s Joint, the process to opening a boutique without even selling weed has been laden with bureaucratic red tape and financial obstacles.

Those started on February 9, when the city received an anonymous complaint alleging the two were operating as a smoke shop and selling weed without the proper credentials. They were shut down immediately. Come the spring, Cavano and Vegh had to testify to Cleveland’s Board of Zoning Appeals that not only were they not selling cannabis, but less than a fifth of their store was occupied by smoke shop products: bongs, lighters, papers.

The requirement fit in line with smoke shop laws that went into effect last year, following the city’s attempt to limit their growth and more closely monitor those operating already.

But Cavano and Vegh were stumped. The BZA couldn’t give them an exact answer, Cavano said, on what exactly constituted a smoke shop product, just as it couldn’t verify the store’s space limits for paraphernalia.

“We were thinking ashtrays, batteries, pipes,” Cavano said. “But we couldn’t get a true answer from the city.”

The hearing led to another obstacle: the space The Girl’s Joint was leasing didn’t have an official occupancy permit tied to it. The store couldn’t operate without one.

By the time they reopened, on June 26, they were out $17,500. That, and the untold amount of revenue loss—all at the hand of an anonymous complaint.

“Would that have happened if we were men? Probably not,” Cavno speculated. “But it’s one of those things. How can you prove it? You can’t.”

There’s the pastel-colored Zippos. There’s the BYOB shelf, Build Your Own Bong, that resembles a shelf of perfume bottles. The cigarette cases covered in pin-up girls or sparkling sequins.

Yet, no actually stuff to smoke in sight.

“We very much wanted to do this by the book,” Cavano said, standing behind the counter. “No gray area. We don’t touch it, because we don’t want to deal with the headache.”

“We’re already under a microscope,” she said.

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Mark Oprea

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