Bloomscape And Tapping Into The Hip Houseplant Phenomenon

“I’m so excited to go houseplant shopping this weekend!” said no one. Ever.

People like plants — in fact people love plants for the very good reason that were it not for plants there would be no oxygen on this planet for us to breathe. But loving plants, and in fact needing them for continued survival, doesn’t mean that anyone actually gets excited to go houseplant shopping. For the good reason that for the majority of Americans, buying houseplants requires a sojourn to a big box hardware store followed by a game of Tetris as one tries to figure out how to fit the towering ficus they just bought into the back seat of a Ford Focus.

And yet, though the shopping experience for plants leaves a lot to be desired, houseplants have become unexpectedly hip in a recent months.

The operational theory is that millennials, having made peace with the idea they are never buying a home with a yard, are instead turning their apartments into “house jungles,” “urban rain forest” or “jungalows” depending on the phraseology one favors. The goal is to create a home space that is aspirational and ideally pretty Instagrammable — through the powers of “urban wilding,” or what one’s parents would have called “decorating with houseplants.”

It is a trend that Bloomscape founder Justin Mast noticed — and realized he could create a digital experience around. Consumers, he noted, aren’t trying to make their urban homes wild places, but to make them “comfy” spaces, or what the Dutch call gezellig.

“Plants help create gezellig. It’s one of those words with no English translation, but it means coziness, an intimate social feeling that you get when you’re in spaces you love with people you love,” Mast explains.

Plants are very gezelig. Buying plants is not.

But Mast, with a long familial history among Dutch plant merchants, believed he could solve that problem. And, about a year ago Bloomscape launched as the Amazon of plants, more or less. Customers can log in and order up anything from a small pothos to a giant 6-foot palm tree and have it delivered to their door. Shoppers can further filter the selection by level of care required, availability of natural light, and pet-friendliness.

There are other services in the the U.S. that offer similar delivery, but most of them, Mast said, are local only.

Bloomscape is a national service that delivers anything of any size to anywhere in the U.S., using a proprietary method that Mast developed himself. It can handle shipping anything “that grows or blooms” and comes with a soil treatment that helps maintain plants’ root structure during shipping. The packaging materials, he noted, are also patented and keep the plant held in place while it makes it trip to its new owner. All plants arrive in a terracotta pot and saucer and are fully grown. The soil mix is developed in house, and “has been a project years in the making” according to Mast.

The plants, he said, start their lives in Florida before being shipped as “teenagers” to Bloomscape’s greenhouses (located just outside Detroit) where they are repotted and incubated to maturity. Consumers, he noted, favor a variety of plants, but Ponytail Palms and Hedgehog Aloes are popular favorites.

But what Bloomscape says its secret is — and the thing that has helped it secure $1.7 million in seed funding and grow more than 50 percent month-on-month since its launch — is that fact that it doesn’t just ship plants to consumers, it helps them keep those plants alive once they arrive.

Each plant comes with care instructions, which one might expect, as well as with a list of instructional how-to videos online.

Bloomscape also offers a popular “Plant Mom” feature that encourages users to text, email, or tweet photos of plants that are not living up to their full potential. The Plant Mom will look over the situation and respond within 24 hours with her diagnosis and prescription.

And the Plant Mom? She is in fact literally the founder’s mother — and according to Mast the greatest botanist in human history (though he did admit he might be biased).

“The site’s not just for people who want to buy plants,” says Mast. “It’s for people who want to own and care for their plants.”