A Letter From Desk Plants

Hi, my name is Lawrence Hanley, I am the founder and owner here at Desk Plants, LLC. Before I take you through a brief history of Desk Plants, where we came from and where we are today, I want to start off by thanking each and everyone one of you reading this and and also to call out that I am by no means cut out to write for a career. If you live in Austin and you’re reading this, chances are we have crossed paths along the way at one of the many popup markets we have participated in over the last few months, if you’re not from Austin, maybe you found us through our social media channels (run by the most amazing woman I know, Robin Rotman). However you got here, thank you for your support, we are very much in an early growth stage and we rely on close interactions with our audience to help us learn more about what you like, what you don’t and just as importantly, what you want.

I started Desk Plants after spending years in the world of digital advertising with the mission of bringing wellness to the corporate office space through plants. I, along with many others, believe that the more life you can bring in to an interior space in the form of plants, the happier you will feel within that indoor environment. Too often I walked in to an office, whether it was the one I worked at or a client I was visiting, and was struck by how stale and artificial the entire space was. I thought to myself; people spend the majority of their waking hours in these places during the work week, why isn’t there more being done to help make the offices feel more natural and inviting?

Having worked in digital advertising, I had a front row view of the ecommerce world and while we are certainly not the first business to sell and ship plants through an online platform, I did notice that no one was specifically focusing on the consumer in the corporate world. On top of that, most of these online nurseries sell a number of plants that are not well suited for the casual plant enthusiasts, in other words, likely to die without specific TLC. That lead me to form the basis of the Desk Plants mission - to sell hard-to-kill potted plants that are shipped straight from our greenhouse here in Austin to anywhere in the country (or next day delivery for you Austinites).

When considering what plants to offer, I looked primarily at two hardy characteristics; low light tolerance and forgiveness of infrequent water schedules. In alignment with Desk Plants’ wellness initiatives, I selected plants that were also on NASA’s top 100 air cleansing plants list. Sure, competitors may sell a wider variety of plants, but if you consider yourself to be somewhat inexperienced at plant ownership or you’ve had a history of letting some plants die in the past, I won’t bamboozle you in to buying a fern that is sensitive to humidity levels or a pineapple plant that is indiginous to the Hawaiian ecosystem, not your dry office or home. I want to sell you a plant that is going to help you realize that it isn’t you that is the problem in not keeping plants alive, it’s the selection of plants you are choosing.

After coming to a decision on product offerings, one of the other goals I set out to accomplish was to change the way that the nursery industry interacts with their customer base. You see, in my experience, nurseries will help you select some beautiful plants, but once the items are purchased, that is typically the end of the customer-retailer relationship. The thing is, plants are living, so they can also get sick and die. For that reason, Desk Plants has incorporated an active support line (support@deskplants.com), care cards that go home with each plant. I am also investing in a bevy of content that will be released throughout the rest of the year to help anyone cut through the seemingly endless array of information out there to provide a central place for relevant plant information.