Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Adam Rajchel. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Adam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Our first location was in a 250sq.ft. converted shipping container. We did not have a lot of space to work with, so when we were brainstorming ideas, we wanted to somehow incorporate the size of the space into the name. We tossed around combinations of “tiny” and “small” but nothing seemed to work. One afternoon we were watching TV at home and Little Shop of Horrors popped up. It all seemed to click. From then forward we were Little Shop of Soil.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My business partner and I (now husband and wife) both come from a fashion background. While I was the wholesale director for one shoe brand, she was designing shoes for another. We had no experience in the horticulture industry, but we had a passion for houseplants and a desire to start our own business. One day we were coming home from plant shopping in Greenpoint (about a 30-minute drive from our apartment in Bushwick) and we started complaining about how there were no good plant shops in our neighborhood. As we were having this conversation in the back of an Uber, we passed by a small shipping container with a “For Rent” sign. We took a quick photo of the phone number and joked about how we should open our own plant shop in the neighborhood.

The following week I was overseas for work, and my partner called me on Facetime as she was walking around the space. Without seeing the space myself, I gave her the go-ahead and we signed the lease. Within a few weeks (and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears), we opened our doors. Since we both had full-time jobs in Manhattan, we were only able to be open on weekends while we were getting off the ground. As people began to find out about us, we slowly began to build a relationship with our local community and realized we were really filling a void in our neighborhood. After about a year, we quit our day jobs and put everything into building our business.

Community is a big driving force around what we do. Over the past few years, we have been able to open shops in multiple neighborhoods around Brooklyn where plant shops didn’t exist. We try to host free workshops whenever possible and partner with other local businesses to host events in our space. On the product side, we try and carry as many local makers and artists as we can, especially small-batch ceramicists. Brooklyn is home to so many incredible ceramic artists and we do our best to support as many of them as we can by carrying their work in the shop or offering them free space to have pop-ups around the holidays. We will always be a plant shop first and foremost, but our focus recently has really been on building relationships with ceramicists, not only in New York, but from around the world. The ceramic art form is incredibly diverse and we feel as though they do not get the support they deserve.

Have you ever had to pivot?

At the end of our first year in business, we decided it was time to expand into another neighborhood. We signed the lease on a new space, spent three months building out the location, and were all set to open in March 2020. Unfortunately, Covid had other plans. The same week we were set to open, the world shut down. At this point, we were forced to pivot the business. We took our second location and turned it into a photo studio. We would purchase plants once a week, photograph everything, and post them online every Wednesday at 8 pm for pick-up over the weekend. Luckily, we were in the right business at the right time as everyone was searching for plants to fill their apartments during the lockdown. We would sell out of inventory within minutes every week. It was an incredibly scary and difficult time, but at the end of the lockdown, our business was stronger than ever.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Working full-time while building a business on the side provided me with the necessary capital to fund the new venture. We started Little Shop of Soil with $5,000 of savings. We had an inexpensive storefront and put all of the revenue back into the business week after week. Since my partner and I both were receiving salaries from other jobs, we didn’t need to take any money from the business to survive. We were lucky to be in this position. For the first year, everything we made from the business went back into purchasing more inventory, making renovations to the space, and eventually hiring our first employee.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.littleshopofsoil.com
• Instagram: littleshopofsoil
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/little-shop-of-soil-brooklyn-3