Excerpts from a conversation about passion for plants and the business of sharing it.
The aesthetic you're generating with your selection of plant material is really really special.
Dane: Every plant comes from a different place....we are adopting plants, we are digging them up, pulling off the side of the highway, asking people....we're paying grandmas cash.
Macy: We are finding people that are growing as a hobby or for their own private collection and are willing to sell to us because we've developed relationships.
Dane: There's a lot of passion behind it. I'd rather die on these sources, at the end of the day I can eat tomorrow. Ramen noodles aren't that bad.
If you wanted to be us you really can't because there is no way to start and say I want to be like The Plant Daddies and buy what they buy because there is no real playbook.
Whose idea was this? Who's the first Daddie?
Dane: I'm the first Daddie, Macy's the second Daddie, Kenny's the third Daddie.
Macy: All these girls are calling me the Plant Daddie, I think we should be the Plant Daddies....so we pluraled it and started selling plants out of the back of Dane's SUV.
There is no downtime because we don't want our friend to be doing more work than us, we want to take the load off each other.
Dane: We called ourselves the cockroaches of the plant world because we were surviving off of nothing for a little while.
Macy: Things have been tough at some points. If we weren't so close and so respectful of each other it could have gone south. We are lucky to have the three personalities.
"All these girls are calling me Plant Daddie....so we pluraled it and started selling plants out of the back of Dane's SUV."
What sets you apart is the aesthetic and the way you handle the plant material.
Dane: From the git go we wanted to make something that is cool, that's packaged up, that somebody can experience that doesn't know about plants.
Our look has been the centerpiece. We do what we like and think is cool.
Macy: We aren't the typical plant guys. We experimented and found new ways of keeping plants alive in certain areas.
What shaped our look was the plants we like were expensive....we would take the plants from the dead section, rehab them and get them to spark again, they would have a new, unique look and that formed our aesthetic.
Kenny: Less is more to Macy. He likes to pluck them to the point where there are three leaves on the end. It's very intentional.
Dane: We like our plants to be part of the elements of the furniture in the house...something to be part of the environment and not so intrusive.
"We aren't the typical plant guys. We experimented and found new ways of keeping plants alive in certain areas."
The value of the line in your compositions is paramount to everything else. Line is the priority.
Macy: We lose sleep at night talking about certain plants and knowing where one is or if we can afford it or can go get to it. It's an exciting but nerve wracking portion of this business.
There is beauty all over the place. you have to remind yourself, you're going to blink one day and you're going to look over and see a little Ponytail Pom head floating over the side of the freeway. You have to remind yourself you'll get another one.
Kenny: We are really adamant about being the last ones in on the project, down to the last book on the bookshelf. That is going to change what type of pot and what type of plant we use.
Dane: We could also be called the Pot Daddies. We are very heavy on textures and material. And then those pairings. How we pair plants with vessels is our biggest specialty.
We were lucky enough to partner with an import company called Berbere. They are like family now.
Berbere paved the way over the past fifty years, traveling the world to make these connections. Handshake deals back in the 70's in Turkey, Greece, Morocco, Tunisia, Thailand. At times it was dangerous.
Maybe we like it so much because it is so painful that when it does go right it's those little wins....we live off of micro-wins everyday. Small wins.
We sell happiness really, it's not even like we are selling plants. People are stoked to have our plants in their house.
I don't want to say we are advanced horticulturalists at all. We are just artists, and this is our medium. This is what we are painting with, with horticulture.
"I don't want to say we are advanced horticulturalists at all. We are just artists, and this is our medium. This is what we are painting with, with horticulture."
Notes:
Quotes are excerpts from Mirai's Asymmetry podcast with The Plant Daddies.
Designed by: Ryan Neil
Images: Courtesy of The Plant Daddies
