Flourish Plant Market, a company that sells plants and helps customers pick the proper plant for their homes and current lighting conditions, opened up last October in downtown Kent.
Alicia Hall, the owner of Flourish Plant Market, helps those who are new and experienced using her range of knowledge to find the perfect plant companion for the customers.
“I definitely get to know the person a little bit, and I ask them a lot of questions,” she said, “I really want to get down to them and what they have time for and what light they have in their environment to really find out what would be best suited for them.”
Hall’s childhood involved a love for plants, which grew into a business during the 2020 pandemic.
“It started out online only,” Hall said. “I was doing local deliveries, and then when things started opening up again, that’s when we started doing pop-ups.”
“Having done the pop-ups for a couple years prior to opening this location, we kind of understood our customer base a little bit, we eventually found this space, and it was meant to be. I had been looking at Kent, so this was perfect,” she said.
Rich Greene, a customer, has been shopping at Flourish for over four months now and said the company’s experience and service stands out among other similar businesses.
“I’m very much an old-school minded individual,” Greene said, “and as much as I love the internet and know how to use the internet to find all sorts of answers to anything related to plants, I value in-person experience and conversation.”
“When I enter a plant shop, there’s a million plant shops– you can go to Lowe’s, you can go to Walmart, you can go anywhere to find a plant. For me, it’s about the experience and what had me go back to her and her business multiple times now is that experience,” he said.
The Market stands apart from the big box stores or a big retail establishment in that way, taking pride in providing all the necessary steps to ensure that every plant sold thrives in its new home.
She provides QR codes on her plants in-store.
“Every plant that I sell I try and put QR codes on all of them,” she said. “The QR codes will take them right to the website where the care for that plant ‘lives’. I keep all the plants up there as kind of a database of information so if somebody has had a plant for two years they can scan that and then they always have that to fall back on.”
For more information about Flourish Plant Market, including their upcoming moss art workshop, visit their website or visit their location at 113 S. Water St. in downtown Kent.
“We do our best so that we know you’re going home with a happy, healthy plant,” Hall said, “I really want people to succeed.”
Patrick Creedon is a reporter. You can contact him at [email protected].