We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Wendy Walraven. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Wendy below.

Wendy , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

Family businesses… definitely something I always dreamed of having. Growing up in a Hispanic household taught me what teamwork is all about. Having an immigrant upbringing isn’t for the faint of heart. Things aren’t always easy. You have to work three times harder than everyone else to even get acknowledged. I remember staying at home with my younger siblings at a very young age (8 yrs old) while my parents worked double shifts to provide. By the age of 9/10 I was the mom of the house. Waking up early making sure everyone was ready for the day. Walked my little sister to the babysitters house and then walked with my little brother to elementary school, then after school walked back to picked up our little sister, locked ourselves in our apartment in the city and helped them with homework, feeding, etc… I always wanted to make sure my parents didn’t worry about our well-being while they were off working, although now that I am a mother of three precious girls I’d never put them through any of that, but times were definitely different. And the Hispanic culture is also very different- a lot of us are born and naturally know or feel like we have to help our parents and work with our parents. In 2009 my father started managing an event hall. I started working with him in all the areas he needed me. Serving, bartending, cleaning toilets, taking photos for their website, you name it… I can’t say that I always enjoyed wearing any of those hats, but I do know that I LOVED being around my dad, learning all the things from him and taking some load off of him while I was there. He knew he could rely on me and that I’d get there giving him 110%. I then started thinking about starting a business later in life alongside my husband and children. In 2013 my husband started going to school for horticulture and even though I was a SAHM with our first daughter at the time I knew that once he graduated it would be the start of a family affair. We all enjoyed nature and all the things it offers. And that’s exactly what happened.

I truly believe family businesses are a legacy you build in hopes that your family will see you enjoy as it grows – that they become to attach to it and eventually WANT to take care of it alongside with you or when they get older. I try my absolute best to give my husband and girls tasks that I know they’ll enjoy and that’ll allow them to use their gifts in the process. Not everyone is able to do it all without getting burnt out. We all have different gifts and sharing them with each other truly builds a strong foundation in a small family owned business. I want our children to always remember why we started our business and the mission behind it. That they would want to take it to other levels with their creativity. Things are constantly changing and I know they can def do some pretty rad things in the future if their hearts remain in it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

So before I even thought about starting Eclectic Plant Goods I worked at a hair salon for a while and before that I was a dental and chiropractic assistant. Truly I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I just remember I always enjoyed being creative. I also wore many hats for the event hall my father started managing after I got married and had our first daughter. It was a very flexible weekend job that I could work while still mostly staying at home with our daughter. My husband worked very long hours. Sometimes we didn’t even see him. He was home late and left bright and early. He had a full time job and was a full time student. I was then pregnant with our second child and once she was born I battled with postpartum depression which actually led me to connect with plants and nature in a different level. God started speaking to me through them and reminded me of how beautiful and unique I was. How and when I needed to take care of myself. It was truly life saving. We then moved into our first home and I knew I wanted big windows for plants and as always he provided the perfect little starter home that would bring our visions to life. A few years later I got pregnant with our third girl and that was the toughest pregnancy for me – I was doing small gigs for a florist where I met a lady that was also passionate about plants and she had decided that her and her fiancé (at the time) were going to open up a plant shop, so I offered to help in any way. She then pulled me in and I was able to mentally and physically get out of the overwhelming sick pregnancy stage. It fueled my passion for plants. I feel in love with so many plants I never thought I would ever see in person. After my daughter was born she battled with a horrible skin condition that would flare up with anything, we were all suffering as a whole and sleep was a thing of the past. I had to leave the shop and tend to my family and myself. I was running on E and constantly frustrated. Again, I remained rooted in what God had planted in me. Both my husband and I dreamt about owing a little shop with coffee, small finger goods, cocktails and live music to have some of our musician friends play live on the weekends – a little Spanish oasis filled with all the exotic plants anyone could ever imagine.

It was all a dream until I started growing my own plants quickly and started flipping them to buy new ones. I started to sell them on my IG fairly quickly. Then started to make connections and started staging events where they would allow me to sell the plants afterwards, and then just started getting more calls for other little and bigger installs. Until one day my husband mentioned pop-ups. Right before the pandemic we had our first market where we almost sold out and after that there was no stopping. People got hooked during the pandemic and our pop-us only got crazier and busier. People from all the over the state and even out of state started to show up and they would wipe us out. They enjoyed the hospitality no matter where we were, the quality of our plants and pots, the time we got to spend with them and chat… so much support and genuine love just poured over us during the pandemic. We’re doing pop-ups weekly, have an online shop where we ship nationwide and even though we have other things up our sleeves – we are happy to announce that we are going to also create a tiny jungle in the back of Break Coffee in downtown Duluth starting December. It will only be open on the weekends, but during the week we will have the flexibility for our customers to pick up orders, designers to shop privately for their interior designs, meetings, etc… we will be selling our very own hand mixed soils, pots, exotic tropicals and soon bonsais and arids. We will continue to take on larger interior plant designs and scapes, home/business plant consultations for those that already have plants and need guidance or want to green up their space. We honestly do our best to do all the plant things and take care of all your plant needs. And if we can’t we will guide our customers and send them to the right folks. We strive to give our customers our absolute best service. And I think some of the reasons why we are still around are our intentionality in all that we do and quality of products.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Soooo…. My business partner is my husband Marshall Walraven. We met in High School – we were mostly acquaintances. We never thought we’d even date. But one day he invited me to a bonfire gathering he had where everyone ate his food, drank his alcohol and quickly ditched him to go on to the next thing. I stayed to help him clean hoping he’d let me have a huge barrel full of cheese puffs and the rest is pretty much history. We became close friends after that and before we started dating I move to Santa Barbara, CA to work – not knowing when or if I would return. It was tough, but we believe it was in Gods plan. I came back summer 2009 for my sisters graduation, he proposed and we married six months later. We’re going on 13 years of marriage, have three beautiful girls and run a couple of businesses. Blessed nonetheless.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

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Contact Info:

• Website: www.epgatl.com
• Instagram: Eclecticplantgoods
• Facebook: Eclectic Plant Goods