We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Travis Thein a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Travis, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?
I’m happy to shift the focus a bit to match “Is there something you do other than the industry standard?”
OR — What does corporate america get wrong in your industry? I can explain that all the big box companies use the cheapest ingredients, methods, and brainwash what’s important using Billions in marketing dollars and their practices lead to a cyclical process of failed indoor plants for everyone leading to everything thinking plants are hard and they don’t need to be.
Otherwise this would be my response:
We constantly hear, “Oh no, I kill every plant I touch. I have a black thumb.” when we’re talking to potential direct customers. The basis behind our products and the Sol Soils brand is to make houseplant care easier and less stressful for everyone. If you use a high quality, chunky, performance potting mix, it removes the number one killer of houseplants (i.e.- stressor for plant lovers), which is root rot from overwatering. For the record, overwatering is less about quantity of water given to a plant each time that you water, and really referring to watering too frequently. This type of mix has other benefits for houseplant newbies and fanatics alike. It makes you less prone to dealing with fungus gnat outbreaks. The materials in these mixes also do not dry out entirely between waterings, allowing you to water less often if you’d like, with some moisture remaining availble to the roots for an extended period of time. Normally you have these saturation peaks and valleys for indoor plants that secretly kill them as time goes on. With our mixes you can ignore all of this. They allow for more uniform moisture availability between waterings (start to finish), helping to avoid the normal ‘peaks and valleys.’
That Black Thumb conversation has become so much fun and truly rewarding as time has gone on knowing we offer easy solutions that don’t require learning a new care style; simply change what you’re using in order to see the benefits. And 3.5 years in as a brand, we have gotten a consistent stream of personal planty success stories from customers via IG, email, and 5-star reviews.
Travis, 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?
I have a Finance background, which made my foray into the houseplant industry–which became my personal hobby (obsession) right before COVID took over all of our lives–fairly non-traditional. I initially fell in love with plants while converting my yard from turf grass to perennial, native pollinator gardens. Once it got cold in the Fall and I knew that I wouldn’t see my Northeast Minneapolis yard for ~7 months, I ended up buying 15-ish specific, varied rare cacti from Etsy. This all started a wild rabbit hole for me as I started looking into what kind of soil I should be using for these sweet new indoor plants. Long story short, the official expert internet answer was “you can’t buy it, you have to make it.”
Some “career” context… 16 year old Travis decided we were going to do Finance for our career. I really, really tried to make that happen by obtaining a Finance degree from Univ of Kansas, near my hometown of KC, worked in Finance for a couple different large companies there, and then went back full-time to business school at UNC-Chapel Hill to branch out a bit geographically. I ultimately happened across Target corporate finance leadership development HQ roles at a career conference, and ended up working at Target for 7 years in Finance, Store Operations, and finished in Supply Chain.
In all honesty, I will forever be a huge fan of Target. The HQ culture is amazing, energizing, and collaborative. Once I started selling my chunky/gritty potting mixes, both of my higher level leaders in different areas of the company would ask me at least monthly how things with going with Sol Soils and how they could help. Eventually the brand got enough retailer traction that my VP–after asking a lot of questions on how viable this business might be–told me I should quit for my own benefit just to try it and defend my company against competitiors that could kill us over time if I were just doing it part time. They did said “don’t get me wrong, your job will be filled, but if you fall on your face you can absolutely come back to Target at least at the same level.” I loved that and honored their request for giving a 60-day notice letter so they didn’t have to stress about backfilling me. hah
Anyway, now it’s me running Sol Soils full-time (I formally quit the corporate world Aug 2023) problem solving alongside my best friend from my time at Target HQ, Leah. She is my COO and has pretty much all of the skills that I lack. It’s truly a perfect startup duo union.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Our founding story starts with focusing on making something we knew was better than options readily available. However, we were doing this as a hobby and never intending to make it a full-time career. It started so, so small. Literally figuring out how to make a website and then were stunned to have an order on day 1 from a huge cactus fan in Palm Springs. I still communicate with him and send him our newly released products because we were mind blow that someone found us within hours of releasing our sad attempt at a website. I will say, when that first order came in my good friend and co-founder John Porter and I were in the apartment community pool and started panicking on the logistics of mailing our first parcel to a customer 1,500 miles away!
We started slow with only a few orders a month and were able to operate this side-hustle out of our apartments. I started our Instagram and our followers grew with the help of a few timelapses of cacti flowers blooming set to trending audios that went viral. Some of our initial reels had 50k-100k views, and one early on with almost 6M, which was wildly unexpected. I thought I could just keep repeating the formula. (Silly, silly Travis — yeah right dude).
Since my co-founder and I both had full-time careers, we didn’t have to take a dollar out of the business for the first 2-3 years. We were able to finance the business solely on our profits (the benefit to having a product made of tanglible components that were simple enough to manufacture by hand). One of the silver linings of the pandemic is everyone having to suddenly transition to working from home which allowed for enough flexibility in my day to start a new venture. I completely appreciate that this would have never happened without lifestyle changes during the pandemic. It inadvertently created a number of opportunities for American-Dream-type situations like ours.
We grew our local following at farmers markets, then stopped into our first store with an awkward sales pitch. We were interrupted right away and the shop owner was like, “first of all, I love this – I totally understand what this is and I’ve been teaching people how to make something like this. As a small business owner, I hate national brands and I can’t buy anything like this.” The next handful pitches followed a similar trajectory and theme. We are now in over 1,500 indepent retailers across all 50 states and still growing!
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
This question hits hard at the moment as we’re holding our breath to… not die. Literally, right now. This is not as dire as I’m making it sound. “Are we about to go out of business from our current cashflow position?” Thankfully(!!!!), no. With a few wrong moves in a row though, certainly.
We very fortunately just grew about 45% in a short period through a number of back-to-back shows that worked well for us, but fast growth is much more difficult to weather than I understood previously. After a few years of scaling with the same primary channel of growth, whatever that might look like for a given business, it’s oddly complicated when there’s a large growth spurt at a specific, consolidated portion of each year. This is especially true if you get paid by your customers on ‘extended payment terms.’ For example, we manufacture and deliver the product and then 90 days later you will *probably* get paid… (also the check will “get lost” in the mail and they’ll wait for you to reach back out to get another one sent.)
For us the challenge is seasonality, and our larger customers are a huge % of your business revenue. The bigger the business is, the longer extended payment terms they can generally use to pay you. I now appreciate how easily an amazing small business with a great concept and leadership could fail by running out of cash. Securing a reasonable business line of credit is one way we’ve been able to weather this storm. Many of the other scaling brands we interact with are concurrently going through similar growing pains, which is comforting I suppose. That also highlights that it’s an issue for a lot of scaling brands. Raising capital more traditionally is a way many get through it and allows you to scale more quickly. Another option is a slower, more sustainable path where you don’t do all the things you’re eager to do as fast as you’d like. But you have to figure out what works for your style and risk tolerance.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://solsoils.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solsoils
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/solsoils/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/82882594/admin/dashboard/
- Youtube: https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCSvYMt3EdL2f4QcyutmLltg/videos/upload?filter=%5B%5D&sort=%7B%22columnType%22%3A%22date%22%2C%22sortOrder%22%3A%22DESCENDING%22%7D
Image Credits
Love it! No image credits necessary. We’ve taken or purchaed them all. :)