Bloomify inspiration and beginnings

From the inception of my idea in 2014 to 2016, all of our plants were produced in my home. During this time, as a bootstrapping entrepreneur, I used personal  savings to fund a small plant growth room and a mini lab.   At the start of 2017, we were fortunate to have won a grant from the NC IDEA foundation, that enabled us to finally have funding to move into a factory space in Morrisville.   This gave us the space and resources to meet our growing demand and explore more plant varieties to offer you.

At the start of my venture, I had just left my job as a head scientist in a plant biotech startup with one goal in mind: To make the notorious fragile orchid easy to care for even those with brown thumbs. The one solution staring me in the face was tissue culture, an application not yet applied to the consumer retail space. Plant tissue culture is a technique that is widely used in plant research to grow and propagate all types of plants. The plants are rooted in a gel medium which contains all the necessary nutrients to grow. Depending on species requirements, the gel will contain different non-toxic nutrients, chemicals, hormones.

The most important factor in this whole process is that the whole environment of gel and plant must be completely free of all microbial organisms. Given the millions of bacteria and mold all around us and in the air, this is no easy task! Fortunately, someone back in the day invented a piece of equipment called the laminar flow hood :). 

So all of our "maintenance free" plant terrariums are ecosystems completely sterile self sustaining environments, even our open pot Bonsai Orchid (a future blog will touch more on this). Hence the most important instruction to care for our plant terrariums is not to open the lids, thus introducing bacteria and mold contamination.

Fast forward back to today, we now apply tissue culture gel technology to other plant varieties as well, including carnivorous plants such as the Venus Flytrap and Sundew, and the enchanting Celosia flower. We are working hard to bring you more varieties, including a continuous blooming miniature rose bush. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.