Married co-founders Ivan Martinez and Christan Summers discuss how the seed of an idea grew into a thriving business through a combination of heartfelt passion and powerful technology.
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00:00 One morning I was out for a run and just came across this beat up old ice cream truck
00:04 with a big for sale sign in the windshield.
00:07 And I called the guy, he told me the price, and I was like, "I'll take it."
00:12 [Music]
00:31 Why can't we have a plant truck just like a food truck?
00:34 Why can't we just sell plants out of a truck?
00:36 You can't actually do that. You can't just sell stuff on the side of the street.
00:40 We were able to partner with places.
00:42 We'd come up and be like, "Hey, do you want us to park in front of your space?"
00:44 That's how we would get around the city.
00:46 It was fun, but you could only sell like 50 plants at a time.
00:49 So we knew if we really wanted to keep this business going, if we really wanted to make it our jobs, our living, our careers,
00:55 we needed to scale up into a space that we could sell more, that we could have employees.
00:59 It was fun, but now we have to turn it into a real business with hours and locations and more inventory.
01:06 [Music]
01:09 The way that we designed the space was so that we could keep plants alive and at their healthiest.
01:15 We knew we needed lights. We knew we needed airiness.
01:19 And we needed a place where we could water, so we put drains in the floors because it just makes our job so much easier.
01:26 [Music]
01:30 Why I love plants so much, it just leads to a path of creativity.
01:33 I like designing things for the plants.
01:35 I like taking them as an inspiration to create other things.
01:38 What can I do with it? Can I make it into a silly character? Or can I build a whole store?
01:43 Running a business with my husband is amazing.
01:47 I miss him when I don't see him for a day.
01:50 Like, I'm like, "Oh, babe, you know, we haven't seen each other."
01:54 We know our lanes, right? We know what we're good at.
01:57 It's very easy to divide. And then when we both want to be a part of something, it's also very easy for us to do that.
02:05 [Music]
02:07 We have hundreds of plants. It takes a lot to keep all of these plants alive, and it takes an incredible team.
02:13 One thing that distinguishes us from other plant shops is how much we invest in our team, how much we educate, how much we train, and how we choose people who truly love plants.
02:23 [Music]
02:28 I found this. This is a great plant for you.
02:31 Okay.
02:32 We always wanted to allow us to feel like you just walked into someone's backyard.
02:37 We never wanted to be like a retail space where everybody's just like, "Hi, how are you?" Like, "Let me know if you have any questions."
02:41 Like, we never do that. We always want people to feel super accommodated.
02:45 When they walk in through the door, it's like, "Hey, how's it going? Welcome."
02:47 And sometimes it kind of throws people off a little bit about how friendly our staff is.
02:51 We don't want to sell plants. We want to teach people about plants, and then that will lead them to buying the plants.
02:56 If they feel comfortable, they'll spend the money. They'll buy it.
02:58 If they don't feel comfortable, they're going to walk right out the door.
03:01 The biggest hurdle to get through as an entrepreneur is when to scale, when to just maybe add a few more products to your store instead of creating a whole new store.
03:11 Another challenge was obviously the pandemic and being a small business.
03:15 I would say to our advantage, being a small business, we were very nimble.
03:19 So we were able to react quickly to what we needed to do to stay in business.
03:24 At that time, we didn't have e-commerce.
03:26 We threw up an e-commerce site in a month with a seven-month-old and no childcare.
03:32 We just made it happen because we knew we had to.
03:34 This cactus is amazing. It's also known as the spiral cactus or the hurricane cactus.
03:40 This is also when I started doing a lot of these plant care videos because I sort of always shied away from the camera.
03:45 And at that point, I was like, "Nope, it's just me and Ivan here. We have to stay connected to our customer."
03:51 Everybody sells the same plants, more or less.
03:55 If you don't have a unique identity, then you get sort of lost.
04:00 And the internet has allowed us to express our unique identity.
04:05 Online and in-person, we use the internet for everything.
04:08 The internet is what runs our POS system.
04:10 So if we're doing purchases in-store, it's going through our POS system with mobile payments and credit cards
04:17 and all running through a very fast connection that we have here at the shop.
04:21 We use cloud to document all of our inventory, what our profit margins are on every single item in the shop.
04:29 Not one thing in the shop does not have a profit margin.
04:32 We want to know what we're selling. We want to know our reports.
04:35 We want to know how our sales are up or down from last week, from last year, from last month.
04:40 Cybersecurity is really important.
04:42 We're local. Everybody knows us here.
04:44 Gaining everybody's trust and making sure that they know that they're safe with using their mobile phone here at the shop,
04:49 that's really important to us.
04:51 Tula Gardens is a really important part of the business.
04:56 We go to commercial spaces, residential spaces.
04:59 We install plants and then we offer recurring maintenance programs.
05:04 Maintenance is funny because people say, "Oh, I can water that plant."
05:08 And I say, "I know. I definitely know you can water that plant."
05:11 But maintenance is so much more than watering.
05:14 We do a lot of cleaning. We mist, we water, we prune, we rotate, we feed.
05:20 And then not only that, most of our maintenance programs are guaranteed.
05:24 So if anything starts to look not so great or starts to decline or has bugs, we just swap it out.
05:30 Tula House started off as Tula Plants and Design.
05:35 We always had this vision that you could buy plants and you could also buy things for your home.
05:40 We leaned a little bit harder on the plant side in the first few years.
05:44 And coming up in the future, we're going to lean a little harder on the design aspect.
05:48 Furniture, home goods, and anything that you live with inside your house, that's what we're going to focus on.
05:54 Growing a business is like growing plants.
05:57 You need light. It needs to be a space that people want to be in and enjoy.
06:01 You need people who care. And everything has to be in harmony and balance.
06:05 Like, you have to be aware.
06:06 Just like plants. Every morning I check out my plants.
06:09 Just seeing how they're doing and what they're responding to.
06:12 Are they thirsty? Oh, it's been really hot. Okay, I need to water more.
06:16 The same thing with a business.
06:17 It's pretty inspiring and it can be addictive because you're just like,
06:22 "Come on, let's go. Let me see what else I can grow and what else can give back.
06:26 What can I get to flower?"
06:28 All the wonderful things.
06:30 [Music]