How Gardenuity Is Growing Gardening Through Wellness

To Donna Letier, “gardening is not about perfection, it’s about participation.” That philosophy drives Gardenuity, a category-disrupting concept that’s as much about cultivating gardeners as gardens.

While the U.S. gardening category is growing — it’s expected to hit $27.4 billion by 2030 — 90% of beginners fail in their first attempts, said Letier, Gardenuity’s CEO and Co-founder. "Gardenuity is a gateway for people who may be intimidated to start or who have failed to grow things before. We can turn that into confidence,” she told CO—.

Fueled by horticulture science and technology with a microscope on customer experience, Gardenuity (a morphing of garden and ingenuity) aims to make gardening, and by extension its associated health benefits, accessible through customized kits. Gardening is linked to reduced stress levels, mood enhancement, and social connections, among other potential benefits, bolstering the company’s positioning in the $2.1 trillion wellness category.

Launched in 2019, Gardenuity sells its indoor and outdoor garden kits online, via the B2B channel with gardening workshops that are an employee benefit, and it is expanding into retail stores with a new Scotts Miracle-Gro partnership.

Seven years on, the business has scaled to over 3 million harvests across the U.S.— a core metric of customer activity — in addition to thousands of desktop gardens.

How Gardenuity works: An AI-powered ‘Match’ platform

Customers start by taking a quiz on Gardenuity’s Match platform about their location, motivations, availability of outdoor space, and level of experience. Horticulturists, meteorologists, soil engineers, and other experts inform the artificial intelligence-powered platform to provide a plant collection best suited for the customer’s location and needs, as well as a season and predictive weather forecast.

“We gauge success from the beginning,” Letier explained. The first 10 days are critical. “If a [cold] weather pattern is coming your way, for example, it might not be the right time for a particular plant.”

Length of time until harvest is another consideration. “If the weather is good now, but it’s six weeks to harvest, you might not achieve success depending on the weather and time of year,” she said.

The company ships plants that are grown by farm partners around the United States, and a kit that includes a customized blend of plant nutrients, along with an instructional guide and access to a Grow Pro support team. Gardenuity offers outdoor container gardens, desktop gardens, and, most recently, microgreens in a bid to ensure that anyone can be a gardener regardless of space.

“Everything comes premeasured, and they are all container gardens, which makes it easier if you receive a text message, for example, that a cold front is coming and to move the garden inside,” Letier said.

According to Letier, data shows that 99% of customers who take the Match quiz make a purchase, and 98% enjoy gardening.

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Gardenuity co-founder: ‘Data pointed to this being an industry ripe for disruption’

Letier’s background is in retail and dataf, starting in Neiman Marcus’ corporate offices, which informed her approach to Gardenuity. “I was blessed to learn under [the department store’s former president] Stanley Marcus and see firsthand what experiential retail looks like,” she said. “I soaked in data that pointed to this being an industry ripe for disruption from an experience standpoint.”

“Gardening has not been refreshed for a long time. It’s an industry where 90% of first-timers fail,” she continued. “It’s not that the products aren’t great, but the experience may not be great.”

Together with business partner and co-founder Julie Eggars, who handles operations, the pair set out to create a business plan to address that market void. They also gleaned a lot from meal delivery companies that take people who might not be great cooks and turn them into consumers interested in cooking, Letier added.

While Gardenuity markets across demographics, its fastest-growing segment is Gen Z, which increasingly prioritizes well-being. “My 30-year-old daughter will leave work to go to her 5:30 yoga class and then return to work,” said Letier. “They make self-care a part of their daily schedule.”

Gardenuity was self-financed in the beginning, but it now has a roster of heavy-hitter investors from the retail and finance sectors, including Laura Baldwin, Managing Director of Golden Seeds; Mike Sutterer, CEO of Bonnie Plants; and Sharron and Unity Hunt, Owners of the Kansas City Chiefs.

To boost its scaling efforts, the startup recently launched a garden kit collaboration with Scotts Miracle-Gro and Bonnie Plants, which bills itself as the largest supplier of vegetable and herb plants in the U.S. Aimed at new and emerging gardeners, the Inspired to Gro Patio Garden Collection is designed to make growing herbs, vegetables, and edible flowers easier.

A common goal brought the three businesses together, said Letier: How do we engage the next generation of gardeners?

“Inspired to Gro is the result of that thinking,” she added. “It combines fully rooted plants from Bonnie, trusted plant nutrients from Scotts Miracle-Gro, and Gardenuity’s curated growing system, seasonal plant matching, and Grow Pro guidance into one complete experience.”

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The pandemic gave rise to virtual gardening workshops, now held nationally

Gardenuity began selling to individuals, but the pandemic and its subsequent at-home and hybrid work schedules drove its corporate segment, which now accounts for 50% of sales.

“An insurance company came to us who had been reading about loneliness in the workplace,” explained Letier. They wanted to roll out [gardening workshops] as an employee benefit. COVID hit, and four weeks later, they asked if they could move the workshops online, she said.

That was the beginning of virtual gardening workshops, which the company now holds nationally. “About 20% of the workshops we do are in person; all others are virtual, and we have 53 in total scheduled next week alone,” Letier said.

Eighty-three percent of corporate customers rebook. “As hybrid and remote work increased, corporations realized that they were not feeling a culture of connectivity. Many companies might offer wellness-related perks like subscriptions to Calm or Peloton, but that is not bringing connection,” explained Letier. “With gardening, you’re building a community, and that gives you something to talk about.”

‘You wait for it to get more perfect, and you wind up doing nothing’

Letier’s advice to startups sounds deceptively simple for someone who disrupted a venerable category. “Just start. You wait for it to get more perfect, and you wind up doing nothing,” she emphasized. “If you don’t look at your first [slide] deck and feel a little bit embarrassed, you waited too long.”

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