ardening go away is frequent within the City — however James Folger took it very actually when leaving Rothschild.
Instead of beginning at his new job, Folger spent his three months gardening leaving deciding to arrange his personal, er, gardening, business.
He launched The Stem, a “one-stop-shop for all things green”, promoting indoor and out of doors plants, dried flowers, grow-your-own units and pots. Turnover is ready to hit £2 million this yr.
“I’d taken the well-trodden path into investment banking — completing internships and working at Goldman Sachs and Jefferies International before spending three years at Rothschild,” Folger, 29, explains.
During gardening go away earlier than a brand new position, nonetheless, Folger discovered he “loved being surrounded by plants and nature, and with a long-standing interest in e-commerce, the idea of selling plants online suddenly seemed very obvious.”
He spent summer season 2019 brainstorming and creating his model, The Stem, earlier than paying an company to make an internet site, which took six months. He sourced vegetation from wholesalers and “photographed them in the street as the lighting was too bad in my flat”.
“I needed somewhere to keep the plants, so I found the cheapest space I could in London — a 100sq ft unit on the second story of an old Victorian warehouse in Wembley,” Folger provides. “Only, the goods lift didn’t work and the plant trolleys didn’t fit.”
The subsequent step was supply: “I thought the easiest way would be to do it myself, so I bought an electric van and swapped working on £10 billion M&A deals to hand-delivering plants around London.”
The entrepreneur launched his enterprise in March 2020 — simply because the world was shutting up store for lockdown.
“Being a pandemic baby really helped the business gain initial momentum,” Folger explains. “We went from 30 orders in March to more than 300 in April.
“It was just me doing everything, from planning delivery routes on Google Maps to ordering stock, delivering orders — although since it was in lockdown, at least I didn’t have to worry about the traffic — then customer service and managing our Instagram.”
To start with, Folger was entreating his pals to purchase vegetation, however gross sales surged through Instagram: “I initially grew the account to 10,000 followers by constantly growth-hacking — following and unfollowing people to make the account grow. I did it so much that I got blocked a few times.”
By January 2021, annual turnover was £1 million. The Stem — which Folger first funded with £6000 saved from his banking profession plus a £25,000 start-up mortgage — launched a crowdfunding marketing campaign on Crowdcube. It raised over £500,000, nicely above an authentic £150,000 goal, with backers together with an early investor in Bloom & Wild and fintech GoHenry.
Folger branched out (sorry) into Christmas bushes early on: he ordered 150 to promote on, however they wouldn’t slot in his warehouse, so he had them delivered to his dad and mom’ house in Essex.
“Each night I was driving up and down the A12, managing to fit around six trees in the electric van, then driving back to London to deliver them. The van kept running out of battery in the cold. But I think the customers appreciated the effort!”
Last Christmas, he offered 4000 bushes — however the pallets have been so giant they too didn’t match into his new, far bigger Leytonstone warehouse: “We had to leave them outside the door and were really worried that they’d be stolen.”
There are already main gamers in UK on-line backyard retail, however the whole trade is price £7.5 billion a yr. Folger factors out that on-line penetration is 40% decrease than the retail common. Isn’t that as a result of we wish to see, contact and scent our vegetation earlier than buying?
“Lockdown saw people gain the trust of online garden shops,” Folger says, “plus millennials have a much higher propensity to shop online, and as they grow into more core gardening consumers, the market will increase.”
As a London-only enterprise, The Stem’s turnover was simply over £1 million in 2021, “about 1.5% market share of the London indoor plant market,” Folger says. It’s now increasing nationwide.
“If we can achieve that same market share across all of our identified product sets and the whole of the UK, that represents an £85 million revenue opportunity,” he says. “That is what we are attacking with all our energy.”
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