This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Friends, listeners, and community, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. Welcome as well to our weekly segment known as Throwback Thursday, where we take an in-depth look at somebody whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Now, this is a really cool story today.
Two weeks ago, we focused this episode, this segment, around a guy known as the plant influencer, the plant influencer of Toronto. And naturally, we try to space topics out a bit. So when I was looking at all the notes for upcoming Throwback Thursday segments, I saw that this one was about plants. And I was like, oh, that's cool, but let's push the plants back just so we're not like all plants all the time. But when I listened to the interview with Abby, some parts of which you'll hear in a moment, I realized she had a really good story that I just didn't want to wait for you to hear.
So this is the month of plants, apparently. And after years of being part-time, Abby opened her shop in January, 2020. She opened a retail shop in Pittsburgh and naturally was quite worried because you may recall January, 2020 was the last normal month of life for most of us, especially anyone who is in a public-facing kind of business, like a new retail shop. But in her case, she really ended up turning things around. So she's got a great update along with some helpful lessons.
You always hear this thing about find your niche. And she even mentions that in her advice. She's like, yeah, yeah, you always hear this thing. But it's so important in a crowded space and she actually was able to find a good one. So it's always good to look and say, okay, not just find your niche, but how does one do that?
What are specific examples of people that have done that because that will perhaps allow somebody else to think, okay, what is my thing? Not just my broad area, but what is my specific plant expertise? Am I gonna be the plant influencer? Am I going to be Abby from Pittsburgh? Or am I gonna be myself?
The best answer is probably to be yourself, but how can you make that marketable? Anyway, enough about me. I learned a lot from Abby's interview. So let's hear some highlights from her and I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Abby Falcioni from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And I own Perico Plant Co, which was previously featured in episode 803. I got started back in 2018. I was working a full-time corporate job in the supply chain and finance world and just wanted to do something in my free time on my own with something that I loved, which was plants. So I started an online house plant shop, which you can hear more about in that previous episode. And I did that for about a year.
And then in 2019, whenever we recorded that last episode, I was just branching out into doing local pop-up shops around town and finally getting my hands wet and selling in person instead of just online. And having my husband come and help me because I needed extra help 'cause they were doing so well. Yeah, it was just a pretty, I think stereotypical side hustle, just kind of finding time wherever you could find it. So once the lockdown happened in Pennsylvania, it was all very uncertain and no one really knew what to do. However, my space and the warehouse I opened in Pennsylvania was technically allowed to stay open 'cause I'm an e-commerce company.
So I was actually set up pretty well for COVID and the lockdown 'cause I was already set up to ship customers their orders. And that's exactly what I did. So honestly, I don't know if I would have grown as much as I had in 2020, my first technical like big year in business, had it not been for people really wanting to have plants in their homes now that they were all stuck at home and finding my business, especially here locally. I was shocked at the amount of people who were willing to pay for shipping and I was sending it two miles away 'cause no one could leave their homes. So all of my inventory was already on the website.
I still have that same Shopify store that I had for the last two years. So I was really set up for success actually, which was incredible. And then just sort of went with the flow for the rest of the year. Like I'm sure every other business owner has done. And I continued the pop-up shops where possible and doing sidewalk shops.
So that was also a great way for me to advertise. And Shopify put in place a curbside pickup option into their interface. So from May onwards, that's how I've made most of my money is people buying online and picking up at my warehouse here in Pittsburgh. And I still ship across the country and that's still a great avenue for revenue for me. I was fortunate enough to hit 100K in revenue by November of 2020, which I didn't expect to happen at all.
I was very, very happy with that. It was sort of a stretch goal of mine once I kind of got to see how the year was going. So in terms of hitting six figures in nine months in a business essentially started during the pandemic, I'm pretty happy with the growth that I've had and continue to see that going into 2021. One of the biggest challenges that actually any house plants or plants seller in general has been facing is a plant shortage across the entire country. This is both in seeds and outdoor plants.
I think demand has skyrocketed this year, which I've obviously benefited from. However, that's led to incredible shortages at the growers in Florida. And on top of that, they are also dealing with the repercussions from bad hurricanes in the past five or 10 years. 'Cause the plant supply chain, it takes so long. If you go to a store and buy a five foot tall tree, just think of how many years it took for that plant to get that large.
And if a grower gets its inventory wiped out or damaged, that could be years of sales that are taken away from them. So my advice to you in, if you're looking to get into any sort of plant business, would be to find your niche and differentiate yourself. And I know that is sometimes just something you hear about in a marketing class or whatever, but in a saturated market like online plant sales are, or even locally, you're competing with other plant stores, florists and garden centers and Lowe's and Home Depot, you really have to differentiate yourself. So I focus my entire website on helping beginners find their plants. Just sort of like a questionnaire, like form type of thing.
You can go through on my website and then everything is kept nice and simple on the product pages to really just get people started with houseplants. One of the biggest surprises and benefits I am getting out of starting my own business is, so I do the retail side and the wholesale side and retail, I get to make people happy every single day by giving them plants, which is so much fun and talking to everybody is so much fun. But what I didn't know I would enjoy so much is talking to my wholesale clients and getting to know other people who are running businesses 'cause they're in it with me. No one else knows unless they're in the arena, they're with you fighting the same fight you are, like the struggles of, all right, how am I gonna pay rent this month? All right, my heating bill was really high.
What can I do to reduce that? And how am I gonna get inventory in and a consistent schedule? Talking about those problems and helping other business owners and learning from other business owners has been such a wonderful benefit of this. It's sort of like your own little MBA, I feel like, without having to pay all the money for an MBA. [Music]
Awesome, thank you so much, Abby, and definitely hitting six figures in your first year of business, your first year of full-time business at least in the midst of the pandemic, right as the pandemic hit even.
That's really fantastic. That's really something to be excited about. So we are excited for you as well. I did not know that there was a plant shortage. I had no idea.
I've heard about the cheese shortage, various other effects of the pandemic, but I didn't realize that there was a nationwide or perhaps a global shortage of seeds, outdoor indoor plants, et cetera. And I really love the focus on houseplants for beginners. I think that is so smart. I actually was taking a look at Abby's website. It is pericoplantco.com.
I encourage you to go check it out, Perico Plant Co. And Perico has two R's. She has these beginner bundles, which I was excited about. I was actually going to order one, but it looks like it was sold out, at least at the time I was recording. So I will go and take another look.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to place my order and maybe some of you will as well. If you're in Pittsburgh, of course, you can take advantage of that local curbside pickup option. But fortunately, as you heard, she ships elsewhere as well, although just in the US. I don't think she ships plants to Australia because that would probably be against the law and also not great for the plants. The Throwback Thursday segment is one of our most popular features that we introduced last year.
And as you have heard, we're going to keep it going this year as well. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you've got a question, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. The notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1545. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.
I hope you'll subscribe and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
