Sprouting An Online Plant Startup From An Idea

Eliza Blank was extremely keen on the benefits of plant ownership as a city dweller. Houseplants made the spaces she lived in friendlier, they clean the air — and looking at plants “makes people happy.”

Or at least looking at living plants makes people happy. Looking at houseplants they are slowly killing, on the other hand, is not exactly a mood elevator. And, in Blank’s experience, keeping her houseplants alive was a much more difficult feat than she ever had expected it to be.

“I would just kill every single one of them,” she told the Guardian. 

She wasn’t the only person she knew who was having this problem, nor was she the only person frustrated by the fact that there seemed no easy or obvious solution. She didn’t want to kill her plants, her friends didn’t want to kill their plants. But none of them had a good idea where to buy plants in the city, which plants thrived well in apartment conditions, if there was a magical technique to watering them or — in short — how to be a good plant parent in any way, shape or form.

Plus, she noted, buying plants in a city, transporting them by subway and then hauling them up multiple flights of steps only to have them die so she could start the process over again was rather disheartening.

But while others might have given up, or decided that net-net a cat would be easier to keep alive than a cactus, Eliza Blank used her dilemma as the inspiration she needed to found a business — The Sill.

The concept behind The Sill is simple. It is a subscription service that specializes in sending customers two things — plants and information on how not to slowly murder them. The site sells a range of indoor plants, shoppable by size, light required, and collection (e.g. for beginners, pet-friendly). Some plants come in earthenware or plastic planters, while others come unpotted. The plant product pages, beyond giving a customer an idea what the plants will look like, also come equipped with the data necessary to keep the plant alive, such as how much sun and water it needs, what humidity conditions it likes and what temperature it should be kept at. For the particularly curious, there is also a biography for every plant, so its eventual owner can learn a bit more about where it came from.

The goal, according to Blank, is to connect a customer to plant they will not only love, but also have a good chance of keeping alive with proper care.

The site also offers customers the chance to have plants come on subscription, one-per-month for $35. Shipping is free on subscription and on orders over $75. Otherwise, you’ll pay a $10 flat-rate fee for standard five- to seven-day shipping.

The firm sprouted from humble beginnings, with a pitch and a Kickstarter campaign that brought in about $12,000. Not a tremendous sum — but enough seed money (pardon the pun) to get the business up and running as a bootstrapped operation.

And a successful one, though not initially in the way that Blank had intended. The brand’s biggest buyers for the first four years of its life were corporates looking to liven up workspaces. It was revenue-generating work, and allowed the firm to get bigger and better known, but it wasn’t quite in line with Blank’s original vision or passion for consumer sales, so about three years ago she began winding that side of the operation down in favor of building up the consumer side of the shop.

Flash forward to 2018, and the brand had successfully made that more consumer-centric push as more millennials discovered the joys of plant ownership. The Sill reported 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth last year, seven-digital revenues and 50,000 deliveries across the continental U.S. Additionally, the firm, which was once wholly located in a Brooklyn apartment and was an almost entirely one-woman show (for the first few years Blank picked every plant the firm shipped, and every artisanal planter) now has four retail outlets (two in New York, two in LA) and 70 employees.

And the goal, with the now $7.8 million in venture capital funds The Sill has raised, is to continue to grow out and scale the businesses.

“Our goal has been to make people happy with our plants — and our growth has shown we can absolutely do that,” she said. “Our next question is how do we continue to scale that — and really build a community around indoor gardening.”