We recently connected with Lizzie Geerling Claire Troll and have shared our conversation below.

Lizzie Geerling, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Working jobs that are often stressful (Lizzie a viral immunologist by day and Claire an occupancy planner by day), we sought a creative outlet that would allow us to channel our love for all things plant-y while stimulating the creative areas of our brains that we have always loved flexing. We became members at Tech Shop, a maker space that exposed us to some amazing machinery that would really open the doors to the creative mission for our business, like a laser engraver and an octopus arm screen printing machine. We dreamt up our early designs (some of which are still our most popular) while spending many late nights at Tech Shop, and we began selling our homemade creations on our Etsy shop, and soon at in person markets all over the St. Louis area. We were having a lot of fun fine tuning our designs and meeting other STL natives who were passionate about all things plant-related and shopping small, and then Tech Shop suddenly closed. With Tech Shop closing its doors, we lost access to some of the machinery that was instrumental to creating our products, so we thought it could mean the end of our small business that had been up and running for about 8 months. When we announced this on our Instagram, we saw an unexpected outpouring of support from customers and friends we had met over the last few months, and they really inspired us to pivot our techniques into methods we could practice at home rather than relying on the machinery we had grown used to using at Tech Shop.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Being born and raised in St. Louis, we share a passion for all things related to the city, especially small businesses. We have grown up shopping small and local, and from a young age, both of us had a vision for ourselves becoming small STL business owners. We saw the opportunity to combine our love for floral elements with St. Louis by creating some floral-inspired St. Louis skyline designs, and blossomed from there creating other plant and STL-themed goods. We specialize in hand screen printing tea towels that we design ourselves, hand sewing cactus shaped pillows (or ghosts for Halloween!), hand needle felting cacti, and laser etching glassware with designs we draw ourselves. Our home goods line allows you to decorate your home in a way that showcases your love for plants and St. Louis.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

Lizzie and Claire met in high school at Rosati-Kain; Lizzie was a freshman while Claire was a senior. Claire had been playing varsity field hockey all throughout her high school career, and Lizzie made the team when she came to Rosati. Claire is a very talented player, which immediately intimidated Lizzie. Flash forward a few weeks after meeting, and Lizzie would be introduced to Claire’s younger brother, Mike. Lizzie and Mike started dating, but Lizzie would avoid going over to his house if Claire was around just because she was intimidated by her. As time passed, Lizzie quickly learned that Claire was an incredible person, and they became great friends! Several years later, Lizzie and Claire hatched the idea to combine their talents for creating unique home goods to start Saint Louis Succulents, and after marrying Mike, Lizzie and Claire became sisters-in-law in addition to business partners!

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We started our small business journey by selling our goods on Etsy, which served us well for several years. Unfortunately, Etsy has steadily been increasing their rates over the last few years, making it difficult to keep our prices low to be accessible to as many people as possible, while also allowing for us to make ample profits to keep purchasing new materials to work with. Etsy recently imposed an additional fee they take out of shipping prices that customers pay, meaning that we have to pay out of pocket for an expense we don’t profit from. While Etsy has provided us with a lot of foot traffic thanks to their marketplace search engine feature, we recently rolled out our own website through Square, and we’re really excited to start using it this fall! We hope our new website allows us to transition away from Etsy, and we’ve been working on increasing our own marketing on Instagram to try and bring in new customers just as Etsy’s search feature has done for us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.SaintLouisSucculents.com
• Instagram: @SaintLouisSucculents
• Facebook: Facebook.com/SaintLouisSucculents
• Other: Etsy.com/shop/SaintLouisSucculents

Image Credits
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