Houseplant boom:
Industry a winner during pandemic as shutins seek comfort
A symptom of stay-at-home orders might be a green thumb.
The coronavirus pandemic has bankrupted innumerable companies, but it has also created a patchwork of winners. Food delivery services. Clorox. Makers of home gym equipment. And plant shops. Stuck in their homes, Bay Area residents have sought light and life wherever they could, and houseplants have become a hot item. The explosion in demand has cleared shelves across the region, leaving many shops scrambling to restock.
“I’m up over several thousand dollars where I should be right now,” said Lydia Patubo, manager of the Flowercraft Garden Center in San Francisco. “These last few months, I’m constantly amazed and surprised.”
Patubo has hired additional temporary workers, many of them furloughed from other jobs, and quadrupled the shop’s inventory of outdoor items, including pots, flowers and furniture. “We’re exhausted,” she said.
Many shop owners said bestsellers include snake plants, also known sansevieria, a hardy, lowmaintenance plant with spiky green leaves. Monsteras, or Swiss cheese plants, also sell well.
For buyers, the plants can be a godsend. Jessa Parayno, working 12 to 15 hours a day on her laptop in a small bedroom in her parents’ house in San Jose, expanded her collection of succulents, hanging baskets and other varieties from one to 15 in just three weeks.
“There are times when it’s very stressful, and I’ll turn around and look at my plants, and as crazy as it sounds, I’ll talk to them and it just calms me down,” Parayno said.
While potted plants have been popular with younger people nationally over the past few years, the Bay Area’s dry, generally pleasant weather plays a big part in the current boom. Because the safest place to socialize during the pandemic is outside, people have invested heavily in outdoor decorative plants and furniture. Home gardening also has taken off.
“We’ve seen a lot of people coming in, setting up little outdoor
living areas of all kinds, including outdoor offices,” said Flora Grubb, the owner of Flora Grubb Gardens. The Bay Area has always been attractive for its outdoor living, but now, she added, “People are really taking that to heart and just really making those spaces work for them.”
Since the store reopened on May 9, business has risen about 20%, Grubb said, even though she cut the shop’s hours in half, which allows some staffers to do tasks like unpacking plants, assessing inventory and building displays without customers around.
Shop owners are also becoming savvier at ecommerce to take advantage of the boom. Ken Shelf, the managing partner of Succulence in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, integrated the shop’s online and physical inventory with new software and began offering virtual workshops. He and his staff have taught plant basics and gardening to groups ranging from families and friends to a class of law firm interns.
“At the least, if this happens again, if we’re stuck further in our homes, we’ll be in a position to connect people with real things. Real plants and real people and real soil,” he said.
Companies that sell to businesses have had a tougher time. When the shelterinplace orders were issued, Delano Nursery destroyed $10,000 worth of products in one day. Recently, though, things have been looking up because “the retail end is popping,” said Lauren Borden, the company’s manager.
Until last week, Delano saw about 20 to 30 customers in a fourhour window at its store at the San Francisco Flower Mart, but it could open only 12 hours a week because of safety rules at the Flower Mart. Late last week, the store got clearance to double its weekly operating hours, and Borden anticipates more customers as a result.
Customers simply cannot get enough. Parayno, who works in San Jose, likes to exchange cuttings with her friend Fatima Alamire, who has added to her plant collection since the shelterinplace orders began.
“This sounds so cheesy, but I actually did a photo shoot with my plants a couple weeks ago,” Alamire said.
“Keeping my plant routine has helped me feel a little more normal during quarantine,” she said.