Reinventing Houseplants with leafjoy™ by Proven Winners

Bold ideas that lead to success require a certain level of bravery, but they are what’s needed to propel our industry forward. When we established The Plant Company in 2019, we set a goal: to reinvent how houseplants are produced and sold. Today, we are thankful to work alongside our team in making progress toward that goal and finding innovations in this product category.

As we formulated our business model, we heard the same complaint time and again from retailers—buying houseplants is hard, and the product that is delivered isn’t always up to par. We knew we could do better and set out to fix it.

A key factor in our success is our location in the small mountain town of Stuarts Draft, Virginia. Its rich history as an agricultural community dates all the way back to the 1730s. This centralized location puts us within a two-day reach via FedEx of most of our customers, so plants don’t spend too much time on a truck before they reach stores.

Unlike many other producers, houseplants are our sole focus, and we grow every crop in a modern, controlled greenhouse environment. We use biologicals almost exclusively in our IPM program and virus-index every crop to ensure we are shipping clean, healthy plants that are leaf shined and ready to sell. Our customers are finding that our plants have a much longer shelf life because they don’t go through the shock of being grown outdoors and then merchandised inside.

When it comes to marketing plants, there’s no better company than Proven Winners® – The Brand Gardeners Trust™. Our premium product line was a natural fit for their brand, and their market research played an important role in deciding how to promote, package and sell the leafjoy™ collection.

We’ve learned that one of the primary barriers to consumers purchasing houseplants is the worry about how to care for them and not knowing where they will grow best in their home. That revelation was the chief impetus behind developing variety-specific labels with helpful care tips for every cultivar offered—a vast improvement over the industry’s standard generic houseplant labels.

In addition, leafjoy plants have been divided into four collections based on the plants’ light and humidity preferences including Atrium™, Cocoon™, SpaScene™ and WorkLife™. Color-coded buttons for each collection are prominently displayed on every label and bench card. They make it easy for retail staff to merchandise the plants and for consumers to see at a glance which ones will work for their conditions. The collections are especially helpful to people who aren’t very familiar with houseplants.

Altogether, offering healthy plants with specific care tips and direction for where they will thrive is resulting in amplified consumer success with leafjoy houseplants.

Our growing operation may be young and our goal of reinventing the houseplant business may seem bold, but horticulture runs deep in our veins. We are just getting started and have some exciting new things in store, so stay tuned to The Plant Company.

- Jason vanWingerden and Frank Paul, co-owners of The Plant Company