Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Hannah Bangs. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hannah, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
I like to believe that all ideas exist before we do, and that we are simply vessels for their creation. As a person, I have always been drawn to plants and people. I’ve had the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ from a young age, running everything from lemonade stands, to leaf sweeping, to selling knitted scarves.
Throughout my undergrad in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, I worked a variety of jobs including, but not limited to: Backpacking guide, Camp Counselor, Essential Oils Packager, Cookie baker, Nanny, and eventually barista. As a barista, I was able to travel and find work through Europe, Australia, Boulder and California. Every job that I have had has taught me what was needed to be able to come up with the concept of idyll.
I learned what I loved and what I didn’t love, what my values were, and essentially the kind of business I would like to run. To be completely honest, the first concept of my business popped into mind in Highschool as a bakery called ‘Almost Perfect’ where we sold pastries that weren’t the prettiest, but were the tastiest, this changed iterations a couple times, landing on ‘Houseplant Coffee’ which was a cafe/ houseplant concept (I haven’t written this off yet) that I entertained in a business launching program called LAUNCH by Curate Well Co.
This course helped me redefine my values, hone in on a mission, decipher our ideal clients, come up with a bottom line, and discover what I have to offer that makes me unique. I moved back to Santa Barbara October 2020 mid-pandemic and found part-time work on a coffee farm up the road. My intention was to do pop-ups and gain momentum around town to eventually find a space. What unfolded was a series of coincidences and serendipity that led me from my first pop-up to opening my doors in 3 months.
I oscillated between confidently getting a business license to find wholesalers, to frantically googling how to write business plans and negotiating rent, to showing up to site visits in blazers pretending I knew what I was doing, to going back to google to search what the hell an LOI was and how to talk about bottom lines. I had a real estate agent who ended up showing me a ‘space that wasn’t on the market but may be perfect’ which happened to be the office of a coffee shop I used to work in. I actually turned it down at first to pursue another space! But that space fell through and luckily this one was still open, and lo-and-behold that space is now idyll.
I was extremely conservative with the start up. I had enough of a background with quickbooks, and canva, and managing coffee shops to be able to piece together the basic framework. I found all the furniture on craigslist and marketplace, and I gathered together a willing bunch of artists to try to sell their work there. It very much was a team effort, with me as their fearless (but actually quite fearful and unsure) leader. I made countless excel spreadsheets to track inventory, listened to an absurd number of business podcasts, wrote contracts and made negotiations, and on February 12th 2023 I opened my doors.
My goal was to help people connect with plants, how to care for them, and also local artists in the community. The name came from googling ‘synonyms for honeymoon’ and finding the word idyll which has a couple meanings, my favorite being ‘a short poem of rustic or rural life.’ I loved the idea of my a shop being a poem. They say entrepreneurs create the world they need the most, and I do believe that I needed idyll as much as the community showed up for it. I wanted a world where art and plants and people can not only coexist, but also grow and thrive.
Looking back, even I am in a bit of disbelief that we pulled it off. It was no small feat, and I am humbled by how well the community received us. The beginning was clunky, with a wild set of steep learning curves, all of which I navigated and was met again by grace from the community. If you told me I was going to pull it off, I honestly wouldn’t have believed you! Though I also think entrepreneurs have a habit of selling themselves short, and obviously, I did something right!
Hannah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As I mentioned before, I have an eclectic batch of odd-jobs under my belt. In addition to these jobs, I am also an artist and poet. My hope for idyll was to provide a space where artists would be revered for their craft, and the community could connect with them. Since opening, idyll has carried work by over 100 artists!
Our shop has an assortment of plants, plant care products, mugs, prints, earrings, stained glass, and greeting cards, which has translated it into being a space where people come for gifts! It truly is an honor to function as the hub we have become, and I think what sets us apart is not only the education we offer around plants, but the diversity of our offerings.
I am extremely proud to have funneled over 100k into the artist economy, and to be operating as a *just* profitable business. Almost all of our marketing has been through instagram and word of mouth, and I am full of gratitude that the shop speaks for itself when people wander through. Words could not express how grateful I am for this community, and for all of the new faces who wander through and share our shop with their friends.
On a personal note, I am currently enrolled in a Doctor of Arts program in Ecological Psychology, and I am passionate about helping people form relationships with the living world. A houseplant seems inconsequential, but the ripple effects of learning about and maintaining relationships with them is a small, yet powerful step into finding our way back into a deeper relationship with the living world around us! The greater body of my work is to encourage this re-integration through connections with the lives that support us be it plants, art, or the people that are working with them!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
It is easy to forget how human we are. The most resilience I have found within myself was within my ability to stay human while the mountain of to-dos piled up on my doorstep ON TOP of the woes of being a young woman in my 20s (I was 27 when I started my business). I had SO MANY BILLS and suddenly my ability to pay rent/ support myself all relied on the success of this tiny little business.
I had a long term partner when I opened idyll who by proximity and circumstance had become my main source of support for the shop. I cannot under-sell the amount of help he offered to the shop on top of starting his own business, but the greatest support he offered was quite literally making sure that I ate and slept and to be a sounding board of reason for all of my ideas.
A year into the business, we decided to part ways, leaving me to run the shop, take over his portion of our rent at home, AND run the business entirely on my own. To say that this period of reckoning was chaos, would be an understatement. In fact, it was so painful, it is hard for me to recall specifics from this period of life. I went into full survival mode, doing what had to be done for the shop, and also trying my best to keep myself in one piece. In April 2022 my grandmother passed, intensifying a period of intense pain.
To be honest, everything about that year made me want to quit. I was barely staying afloat, on top of employing people, on top of needing to meet bottom-lines, on top of paying rent and feeding myself. It was a wild and chaotic scramble, but at the end of the day I didn’t feel I had a choice, so I continued to show up and do what needed to be done. I have regrets about how I showed up, but in the end, I did show up. I was vulnerable, and honest, and was met with a softness I didn’t know before existed.
I applaud any business owner AND person who has had to navigate the stressors of life and heartache amidst showing up and doing your best work. At the end of the day I do believe that our vulnerability is our strength, and that I was only able to persevere through this time by being honest and sharing my story. I am grateful for quite literally every person who was there through it, and I am happy to be on the other side where I am able to show up for my customers in a way that i am proud of.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I quite literally learn lessons every day, but the most prevalent one (that I am still learning) is that it is okay to ask for help. I used to see it as a sign of weakness, and these days I find that the only way people can help us a lot of times is to ask for it. As a western culture, we are trained to be self sufficient and to prize individuality. For me, this has translated into being a caretaker and prioritizing other people’s needs above my own (shout out to my fellow people pleasers in the service industry! its why we are good at our jobs!) which led to burn-out and some risky business decisions.
Sometimes, we need to ask our friends and family for help and support, whether it is a coffee or a hand building shelves. I find that I along with many other people have a tendency to suffer in silence, when it is in our best interest to reach out and let people share their talents and gifts with us! The backstory of how I founded my beliefs is too long to type, but the essence is that I am learning how to let people care for me in return and to recognize all the different ways people do it.
Contact Info:
- Website: idyllmercantile.com
- Instagram: idyll.mercantile