As cliché as it sounds, establishing Earth Plants has been one heck of a journey.

But don't worry, no plants were hurt along the way.It all began in a one bedroom flat, with a mango seed...

In 2018 Nathan began a little obsession with wrapping the seeds from our mangoes in warm kitchen roll, popping them in a mug with some warm water and hiding them in odd places around the flat. If you know Nathan, you know he quickly becomes wildly obsessed with random things and on that week, it was mango seeds. The seeds sprouted and some little plants grew, and before I knew it, the flat was just full of these little green plants..My question to Nathan was, what is the point in that? They do not grow mangoes and they are tiny... they are pointless!

Little did I know, that phrase would start us on a mission to planting one million trees by 2025, and starting our own plant business which now I know, wasn't so pointless.

Time passed, the business got bigger and bigger, we connected with a community of people with similar vision to us and the mission began to come alive. Things were going great, and then BOOM! The world got taken over by a crazy virus we had all never heard of. This changed things for us personally, Nathan was an airline pilot and was made redundant.. the business became our sole purpose and income.

We made some poor decisions to ask for help from a third party which we thought had more wisdom and experience, people that would guide us - we made a big mistake, unfortunately, they didn't understand our vision.

The business grew (excuse the pun) and was doing really well however the passion we had didn't quite match up to the people that had joined us. Unfortunately, the business relationship didn't work. Have you ever been in one of those moments where you take a step back and everything in front of you is no longer right for you? It was an odd moment, but we knew what we had to do. It was time to quit.

BUT, we quit that situation, never the vision. It was a temporary pause, we had to re-evaluate what was important to us, redefine our mission and start again. It was a risky call, Nathan was jobless, we had bills to pay but hey, we made it work.The main takeaway for us was always that we had already planted over 80,000 trees in the world with the help of our community! We have learnt some great lessons along the way, and now feel we are in a position to join our community to make a change, a meaningful BIG change to the industry. So here we are..

Going into business and houseplants we were pretty naive and thought the world is made up of rainbows and butterflies. Here are some of the important things we have learnt and we hope they can provide you with some value.

1. Most BIG issues are systemic and they can feel impossible to change. We are all human trying our best to get through life, there's normally not one person to blame or consult for big problems.

2. Values & Beliefs make our Brand. Don't compromise your values and beliefs to compete against your competition. Lead by example and have faith things will change for the better.

3. Don't sell 50% of your business without a plan. It probably isn't going to work out and if it does it is still very risky.

'earth.' Is a brand we are creating that is mission focused on creating a better earth. We are part of earth living alongside the earth to create a better place for everyone and everything. We have strong values and beliefs that will not be compromised to make a profit. We understand a free capitalist market which means we need to make a profit and we have competitors however we will put People and the Planet before profit. The planet will not be negatively impacted in our pursuit of profit. We know how hard it is to make a change, but even a small change can make a difference and inspire others.

We initially plan on sticking to the two things we know and have done before, planting trees and supplying houseplants. However, this time we have a bigger lifetime goal of planting 10 million trees and we will not compromise on our values to compete. PEAT (Why is peat so bad?) should not be used as soil in houseplants and we will not sell any houseplants grown in peat soil. This will mean we have a very small limited selection of plants but we cant compromise our values when earth is facing a climate catastrophe. At the very least, we cant add to the existing problem.

In the future we plan on diversifying our products focusing on connecting people with nature, moving towards a more self sufficient sustainable way of life and hopefully in the future being part of a successful circular dynamic economy.