How Plaant got started

Have you ever experienced the frustration of buying greens from the grocery store. The greens are covered in plastic, close to tasteless, pesticide treated, and usually imported many miles with a heavy CO2 impact. Furthermore, when buying potted greens from the store, most people only get to eat very little of them before they turn bad in a few days and are thrown into the trash. This experience is what initially got us interested in finding a better solution for consuming greens, as well as building a community of people who have the same passion towards growing their own delicious greens for cooking.

Research and learning curve

Like with every new idea or project, we started to research growing our own greens more sustainably, and learned about the technology of hydroponic plant science, LED efficiency and sustainable power sources. Getting to know these technologies and the benefits they bring to growing greens was an essential part of understanding the greens themselves and their natural growing cycle.

Keen to try out the more sustainable way of growing our own greens, we built a couple of sample hydroponic solutions that worked but had no real design aspect. This was not enough for us – we wanted to be able to give our customers something special. After seeing our homemade hydroponic system working, we started to think about how we could make it into something that also looks beautiful; a piece of furniture we would want to have in our own kitchens and living rooms. We put our minds together and came up with a solution, a small green house, that not only grows your greens, but is a designer piece that elevates your home and is the center of focus of every guest that comes by.

Making life easy

The process of creating Plaant took its time. The initial hydroponic systems we built required a lot of work to maintenance, mainly in terms of adjusting the lights and blending nutrients into water. By the second or third harvest cycle, our discipline to take care of the plants usually ran out, and so the plants died as well. We concluded, we wanted to build a product that would make gardening as easy and hassle free as possible - we basically wanted to have homegrown greens without having to lift a finger for it. Our vision is that the median person in the west will get most of their greens from their own homes in ten years, and we want Plaant to play an important part toward this more sustainable future.

The mastermind behind Plaant design

The four founders of Plaant have engineering and business backgrounds. For the beautiful design of Plaant, we have Marco Maringi and his wife Ingrid in our team to thank for. Marco was very into materials, and he wanted the product to make sense to use throughout its every component. He preferred steel before plastics, and thought a sustainable greenhouse should be made in steel and last for many years.

Marco worked closely with us from the early drawings of Plaant in the summer of 2020, when COVID-19 had taken its grip on the world, until the late spring of 2021, when he died of cancer that he had been fighting against for three years. He had then concluded the final design of the main model. He unfortunately never got to see it put in production, nor how well its pre-order campaign was received.

We are incredibly proud of the long way we have come in bringing the product to life and hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. 

The Plaant Founding Team