Gardenio

Gardenio is an Austin, Texas company that helps first-time food growers start and maintain home gardens. Its original model was direct e-commerce: customers ordered through the website and received a grow box, a live organic plant, soil matched to that plant, and a printed care guide. By 2019 the company was shifting to a membership model, taking pre-orders and adding recurring shipments of plant food timed to when plants need feeding.

As described in 2021, the offering is a quarterly garden club membership for new food growers. A first season includes three plantkits, each containing a container made from rice hulls rather than plastic, a live organic plant, premium soil and mulch matched to the plant, and a plant guide, all selected for the customer's location and setup. A feature the company calls "infinite lives" replaces plants that die in the first few months at no additional cost. A companion mobile app, launched on August 16, 2019, provides location-aware growing advice, supplies, and access to a community of nearby gardeners. Operations are small-scale and local, with plants cared for in a front yard and boxes assembled by the founder and volunteers.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Roman Gonzalez, originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, studied philosophy and screenwriting at Brown University and worked in video production, marketing and then as a user experience designer and researcher. An interest in cooking and ingredient variety led him to try growing his own food, which he found unexpectedly difficult; he concluded this was an onboarding problem and applied his storytelling, media and product design background to building Gardenio.

Business model

Gardenio began as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce seller of grow boxes bundled with a live plant, matched soil, and a care guide, and moved to a recurring membership in which subscribers receive plantkits and replenishment supplies such as plant food every three months, plus app-based support and a plant-replacement guarantee.

Revenue comes from consumer purchases of plant kits and, following the 2019 transition, recurring subscription memberships sold by pre-order.

Traction

Gardenio launched its first products in March 2018 and set a near-term milestone in 2019 of more than 250 pre-order memberships and 5,000 people on its waitlist. More than 30 people worked with the company as pro-bono consultants as of 2019 — described as 80 percent people of color, women and LGBT community members — and the founder said over 75 people had donated time to the company over the years as of 2021. The company was a finalist in the startup category of Austin's Mosaic Award, competing against Data.World, Aceable, Squareroot and winner The Riveter.

Latest developments

As of July 2021 the company was a three-person team: Roman Gonzalez as founder and CEO covering product, marketing, finance and hiring; Bayan Rabbani as operations director responsible for order fulfillment; and co-founder Chelsea Shaw running technology.