We recently connected with Jenny Yi and have shared our conversation below.

Jenny, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

The story behind our name comes from Chloe, the Greek goddess of plants, and Mint, the nymph she transformed into the sweet-smelling plant. As our founder was working to launch her brand, she put hundreds of words together and finally came across Chloe and Mint. Although Chloe+Mint serviced weddings and flowers for years, the name really fit the brand as the Chloe+Mint style has always been to organically transform a space instead of masking it. Years later, as Chloe+Mint is now offering plant design, the name truly is a perfect fit.

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?

Chloe+Mint was established in 2015 as Chloe+Mint Special Events, planning and designing weddings and floral design. A few years later, we started offering Brand Activations and worked with many reputable brands and properties across Southern California. Working with properties such as the Grove and Caruso properties led us to installing semi-permanent walls for retail spaces.

Around 2018, we wanted to shift gears by focusing on brand activations and semi/ permanent installations for spaces. As Covid hit the event industry hard, we were already on our way to transitioning into spatial design. In 2019, we landed a big contract with a restaurant group for plant design and seasonal design. We had set our heart by then to work with plants as our founder has always loved plants with her green thumb.

Since then, our business has really taken off, working with restaurants and hospitality groups all over the US. We’ve partnered up with some of the hottest restaurants in LA and New York. With a background in event and spatial design with floral design, we really set ourselves apart from our competitors as we are able to treat the plants as a powerful design element that fits perfectly with the overall design of the space. Our faux installations are carefully selected that it is hard to tell that they are fake!

All in all, our Clients love that we offer a boutique service with designer plants and planters that truly enhances their space that their clients love coming back to.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Chloe+Mint has pivoted multiple times within the last 8-10 years. It took us a couple of years to really come to terms with letting weddings go. By then, we had really built our reputation in the industry and clients loved working with us. But with changes in our founder’s life in growing her family, she re-evaluated certain priorities. It felt like such a natural pivot and we were lucky in the sense that we had the plant business coming in as we were closing out our events and weddings.

We truly believe that businesses can evolve and pivot- and should! The key for us was leaning into our intuition and really listening to what made us happy. And with years of building strong relationships with vendors, we were able to be referred to many of our Clients. We feel we are open to change and trying out multiple avenues by grabbing growth opportunities.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We wholeheartedly believe that we were able to build our reputation because we are good people trying to do good in the community. Our founder has always found it important to get the community involved and give back. She’s created countless mentoring and paid internship opportunities with her event planning company. With Chloe+Mint Productions, she emphasizes the importance of being a connector; helping vendors grow their business. And giving back to the community – we are involved with Baby2Baby and St. Jude with their charity events, even though we don’t focus on floral design we do provide this service as a donation to our charity partnerships.

On a day to day basis, we are just easy to work with! Of course we bring our expertise and advice, however, we know from the start of any project that we all have one goal in mind and that is to open a beautiful restaurant/ space within the time and budget given. Our Vendor relationships are just as important as Client relationships and we just love working with like-minded and hard-working people.

It is also important to protect your energy and the business you’ve worked so hard to build. Not everyone will have your best interest at heart. We’ve unfortunately trusted the wrong people and have learned that the hard way several times. But the reality really is that there will be people out there who want to obtain what you have in a dishonest way. Our continuous success is the result of focusing on what works, learning from what didn’t and consistently striving to be creative!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.chloeandmint.com
• Instagram: chloeandmint
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-yi-28680925

Image Credits
Beatrice Howell Photography, Christian Harder Photography