We recently connected with Meghan McIver and have shared our conversation below.

Meghan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Success for me looks like a balanced schedule and a well-regulated nervous system. A successful week is one where I don’t feel stressed or overloaded and can move through my days at a pace that feels sustainable. I’ve gotten really good at scheduling myself in a way that works for me – I rarely work outside my home before noon and I never visit more than 3 clients or accounts a day. This kind of spaciousness allows me to stay inspired, creative, and connected to my long-term vision and goals. Palm + Pine is just two people, myself and my business partner, Lindsay. There are a million ways we could make our business more financially successful, but not without sacrificing our own time and values. People will tell you sacrifice is the name of the game in small business, especially within the first few years, and that is partly true, but I think sometimes you have to put the shovel down and take a step back and assess what you are ultimately striving for and why. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 3 years of owning our storefront, its that I don’t really care to be “good at business”. I don’t hope that people will see me as a great business person, thats not the legacy I’d like to leave. Lindsay and I are artists first, entrepreneurs second. We want to be known for having an innovative and progressive artistic vision while creating beautiful and distinct spaces. We want to be seen as productive and caring members of our immediate community. Palm + Pine is a very special and vibrant space full of love and joy and creativity – when people feel that and respond to it, we know we’ve done our job.

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

Palm + Pine is a joint venture between myself and my business partner, Lindsay Riley. I started a personal brand in 2017 – I sold plant cuttings via instagram, began offering plant installations and plant care services to local businesses, and taught plant care classes around Asheville. Everything I know about plants is self-taught and experience-based. I was just beginning to plant seeds to build my personal brand into an actual business when Lindsay and I met. We met in January of 2018 and quickly realized our complementary skill sets and similar long-term vision. Lindsay comes from an art and design background with experience in retail and visual merchandising. We put our skills together and formed Palm + Pine in the spring of 2019. We began as a pop-up shop, selling plants at seasonal markets, cafes, breweries, etc for the remainder of 2019. We moved into our brick and mortar space in January of 2020. We are a very DIY project – we do all of our own illustration, graphic design, web design, photography, branding, etc. We designed the shop space ourselves and have built all the display furniture, etc with help from friends. It is just myself and Lindsay running the show!

At present day – Palm + Pine is a plant shop + art house tucked into a neighborhood off the main strip of businesses in West Asheville. We are a queer and woman-owned shop committed to creating an inviting space for our peers and folks who live and work in Asheville. I’ve lived in Asheville for nearly 15 years and have witnessed the changes that have come from the rise in tourism — P+P exists for locals and maintains itself on an average of 85% local business. Beyond the storefront, we offer a service-based side of the business. We install interior plants in both residential and commercial spaces, and offer routine plant care and maintenance services.

We hope to grow the service and design side of our business in 2023. Clients come to us for a more artistic, modern, and design forward approach to plants. The first question I ask myself when adding plants to a space is – what will be the most impactful? Sometimes all you need is one large statement plant in a room to really tie the design of a space together. I take a “less is more” approach and always factor in the size of the room, height of the ceiling, architecture of the building, lines and shapes of furniture, etc when choosing appropriate plants. Anyone can plop a plant in a corner and call it a day — but if you hire us, we choose a plant that will easily survive given the indoor environment, and one that will really elevate the given space. I think a lot about growth pattern, leaf shape, color, etc when choosing plants for interior spaces. We add plants in proportion to other design elements, and work to incorporate them seamlessly into a room with careful precision – the same way a designer would choose a piece of furniture or select art for a space.

Our long-term vision with Palm + Pine is to create immersive, interactive spaces using both living and replica plants as our primary medium. We utilize our current shop space as a mini installation that changes seasonally and have plans to build our first public immersive experiential art spaces in 2023.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We started our business with very little capital. We took out an initial $20k loan when we first registered the business and were operating as a pop-up shop. This was well before we even opened our storefront and really just covered initial start-up costs of business licensing, insurance, marketing materials, and a small amount of inventory. We lucked into our shop space unexpectedly about 7 months after initiating our business and built out and stocked our storefront with about $5,000. We got the keys to our space on January 1st of 2020 and had our opening party on the 31st. We were definitely not ready to be open for business, but we simply had to make rent and needed to start generating revenue. We have built this space from the ground up, little by little, and have never had a big influx of capital to support our dream. Luckily we are scrappy and creative and adaptable, and have made a lot happen with very, very little money. We’ve DIY-ed nearly everything in the store, down to the display furniture and exterior signage. Definitely not the easiest or more simple route to take when opening a business, and not one that I would recommend to most people ! Nothing moves without money, and growing a business with very little capital and cash flow is incredibly difficult. We are currently at a stage of looking into securing a larger loan so we can continue to grow and take our business to the next level.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We opened palm + pine in January of 2020 while still working service industry jobs. When the covid-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, we were forced to leave our service jobs and instead turned our focus completely on palm + pine. We were just getting started and had to make a sharp pivot with the loss of income from our service jobs and the sudden closing of our storefront. We closed the storefront for 4.5 months during the height of the pandemic but put everything online and began accepting orders for local delivery and nationwide shipping. The houseplant industry experienced a huge boom of sales during the pandemic and we were lucky to retain enough sales each month to keep ourselves afloat. We ran a delivery route all over town and were delivering upwards of 60 orders a week. We had never shipped plants before and really had no idea what we were doing, but we adapted quickly to an online model and made it work! The pandemic really set the tone for us and taught us the value of adaptability, trust, and tenacity.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.palmandpine.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/palmandpineshop

Image Credits
Daniel Barlow