Instagram-friendly and bursting with ‘wellbeing benefits’, pot plants are being repackaged and reinvented by smart online entrepreneurs. Alex Moshakis reports on a growing trend
In October last year, an American entrepreneur named Eliza Blank raised $5m in venture funding for the Sill, a New York brand described on its website as “A modern plant destination for the modern plant lover.” Blank established the Sill in 2012, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. “We want to make it fun and easy to own a plant!” she wrote then. It had not been fun and easy for Blank up to that point. Every time she moved from one city apartment to another, she would “try to integrate plants into my home,” she says, but, “I would just kill every single one of them.” She noticed friends facing similar struggles: they neither knew of convenient places to buy plants nor, crucially, how to look after them. Monsteras slowly dwindled; peace lilies faded to stem; fronds slumped to an unhappy limp… You couldn’t call it a bloodbath, really, but there was slaughter.
“Plants are assuredly good!” Blank says. But where to buy them in the city and how to become a dutiful plant parent? “I asked: ‘Why isn’t there a consumer brand that can elevate this to commodity status?’” She became frustrated at first, then excited, the way entrepreneurs do, I suppose, when landing on a new growth opportunity. She would sell plants online! Bird’s nest ferns. Cheese plants. Moss balls… then offer consumers helpful information about how to not kill them.
