We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bryon Daniels. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bryon below.
Bryon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?
At the launch of Greenhouse and for the majority of it’s first year I only had one employee. We were growing the business from small beginnings and running things with a very tight crew. Once I was ready to expand Greenhouse into it’s next phase I began the hiring process. I took this approach fairly unconventionally, using instagram as a way of getting application videos. I was interested in hearing why they wanted to work for Greenhouse but mostly how comfortable they were speaking about themselves. My goal with hiring was to hire based off of a person’s vibe rather than their experience. I wanted a team that customers would enjoy being around and would want to come in for coffee and keep coming back for the conversations. I wouldn’t change a thing about that approach to hiring. It has produced a team of incredibly unique and fun employees who love coming to work and has customers regularly returning for their favorite baristas.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Bryon Neal Daniels and I am the owner of Greenhouse Coffee and Plants. We are a specialty coffee shop offering all plant based drinks as well as retail houseplants and gifts. Prior to opening Greenhouse I was in the creative industry, doing photo, video and marketing for over ten years. I was quickly becoming burnt out marketing other people’s businesses and loved the idea of having my own space that people could come and enjoy. We provide a very unique experience to our community here in Corvallis, offering drinks and snacks that are vegan and gluten free in a space that is vibrant and quite literally full of life. I’m proud of the atmosphere we have created here. Our shop is an inclusive space for people in all walks of life and I love being able to host customers somewhere they feel comfortable being themselves and sharing with friends.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
One of the main reasons I thought I could successfully pull of starting this business is from a time when I was selling plants off of my porch via facebook marketplace. During covid I had a lot of extra free time and needed a little extra cash coming in. I had just recently started getting into house plants and was propogating and growing a lot of the collection I already and quickly ran out of room to keep all of these new plants I created. Every available drinking glass in my house was on a windowsill with some kind of plant growing in it. Once I had more plants than I could handle I got the idea to buy a bulk amount of pots and setup a plant stand on my front porch. I would make listings to facebook marketplace and customers would show up to my porch, grab a plant, and drop $10 in my mailbox. After a few months of selling plants off of my porch I felt confident that I could successfully open my own shop.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Greenhouse has a very… unique marketing presence. The brand and it’s voice can only be described as promiscuous and juvenile in the most wholesome and guilty ways. We’ve always tried to ride the line between being too much and just enough when it comes to making the inappropriate jokes and innuendos. For us, it works. Our customers get it and I’m constantly surprised when the little old ladies giggle at my boyish humor. Whether it is selling stickers of cacti in phallic shapes or throwing a day long celebration for Harry Style’s birthday, we’ve managed to capture some kind of lightening in a bottle. I have two favorite things that I’ve done within our marketing and both of them had me hesitant, asking myself “is this too much? Is this the thing that will make the chamber of commerce revoke my membership?” The first is one of our fall specialty drinks. Everyone does a PSL latte, we all know about it and enjoy it as a guilty pleasure every year. Last year I decided that I would fully lean into the trend and launch our fall specialty latte with pumpkin spice and maple cold foam, the “Basic Bisch Latte”. It always gets a giggle when you call the drink out. The other piece of marketing is borrowed from a meme that has made the rounds for years now. At the top of our store front is a series of panel windows just perfect for window painting and spelling words with letters in each of the panels. Every year at Christmas time we do an entire provocative holiday window painting display complete with shirtless Santa, snowmen with suggestively placed carrots, etc. But the main staple is along the upper windows where in our best holiday spirit we spell out “LET IT SNOW” but due to the placement of our pillar separating the panels it reads as “LE_TITSNOW”.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.greenhousecorvallis.com
- Instagram: @greenhousecorvallis
- Facebook: greenhouse coffee and plants
Image Credits
Amy Dawn Scoville
Anne Blodgett