Bringing back gardens into urban houses

With urban spaces getting cramped and unable to afford houses bigger than studio apartments or at the most 2BHK, gardening has become a luxury in cities. This basic yearning for green spaces has become the foundation for new start-up Green Thumbs, which helps people in bringing gardens to their drawing rooms through a technique called miniaturisation.

“People always have a liking for gardens. But due to space constraints in our houses, we ended up living in concrete enclosures. However, my sister Vageeswari and I founded Green Thumbs to promote miniature gardens or dwarf plants in October 2015,” said Radha Krishnaveni, the co-founder of Green Thumbs.

With no capital to invest, both the sisters started off with conducting workshops on miniature gardens at schools. The money thus collected became the capital, which they used for entering into corporate gifting space.

“Corporate gifting space is huge. We convinced companies to give our miniature plants instead of other stuff. We met event management firms and convinced them to replace flower bouquets with our miniature plants at corporate events,” said Radha.

Recently, they have forayed into experiential gifting space.

“Several people give return gifts during birthday parties. To tap this market, we have designed experiential gifts. This involves us helping invitees to make their own miniature plants, which they can take home,” she said.

Though the sister duo had a good start. Radha says the biggest difficulty in the business is competition from her own students. “People who learnt miniature gardening from us are now focusing on upmarket areas in the city. As we lack space in there, we are losing out on premium customers.”

Radha, however, wants to make her way of adopting ethnic styles her USP as she expands to other cities. “Our USP is our ethnic style and aesthetic approach. These make our products stand out.”

Going forward, Green Thumbs is planning to expand into other cities of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh initially and other metros later.

“We know that expansion is crucial to the survival of any business. So apart from expanding into other cities, we are planning to tie up with schools for conducting regular classes for students to sensitise them on importance of protecting the ecology.”