Rise of the Plantfluencer: Bringing the Great Outdoors Home

In times of social distancing and home confinement, the balcony has taken centre stage. We all remember the viral videos of Italian and Spanish neighbours joining voices on the few square metres of outdoor space they were allowed to frequent during the toughest phase of the Covid-19 related lockdown. Whether one has a garden, terrace, balcony or just a simple window: People have started bringing the outdoors indoors, swapping their social life for a life with plants.

Trends come and go, but some really grow on us. So we reached out to Lina Juvens, researcher with the Belgian trend research and marketing agency Trendwolves, to find out just how relevant the urban jungle trend is. Who are the plantfluencers and how can interior and lifestyle brands benefit from engaging with them?

“The urban jungle trend has been around for a while and has its roots in the city where people living in small spaces were looking for quiet and peaceful retreats. They ended up creating those spaces in their own homes”, explains Lina. 

Back in 2017, The New York Times writes, almost a quarter of the American houseplant shoppers were between 18 and 34 years old. “Part of this millennial indoor generation that is home in vibrant but often polluted cities, was also attracted by the air-purifying qualities of plants, following the advice of a NASA report”, Lina adds. The space agency actually conducted its ‘Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement’ study in 1989, but the green trend picked up and dusted it off decades later to find out about the clean air benefits of the Peace lily and the Florist’s chrysanthemum.

The plant boutique The Sill is just as successful. Funded by a 12,000 dollar Kickstarter campaign, Eliza Blank started her current global plant brand from her New York apartment as an online concept in 2012, The New York Times writes. Now, it offers online workshops, hosts other community events such as cocktail parties, sells all sorts of trendy plant gear, totes and tees included.

Other plant influencers followed similar paths. Darryl Cheng from Toronto, Canada is the green creative mastermind behind @houseplantjournal and the author of The New Plant Parent. Alana Langan and Jacqui Vidal launched their botanical wares studio Ivy Muse in Australia back in 2014 which commits to, as they write on their website, ‘enhancing wellbeing through the use of plants’. One can do so in style, as they too released a book titled Plant Style. Last but not least, Londoner Emma Sibley had a passion for gardening, but no green space in the UK capital and so started her London Terrariums in 2014. The renaissance of houseplants gave her startup the perfect boost and her Little Book of House Plants and Other Greenery has become a guide to many.

The urban jungle trend brings a new boho vibe to home décor and anything that matches green leaves goes: tapestry, printed textiles, vases, pottery, macramé hangers, and wicker chairs. Interior design brands expand their annual outdoor furniture collections with accessories that cater to the plant lifestyle, like Yves Klein Blue and millennial pink planters (in fact, artist Lotte van Baalen founded @plantsonpink, a whole account dedicated to leafy green and millennial pink combos from around the world), brass watering cans and brilliant plant stands and shelves that bring the plant #shelfie to new heights – literally. It is safe to say that these leafy friends have overshadowed the previous green lover of the gram: the avocado brunch.

In Belgium, where citizens could hardly leave the house if not for essentials like grocery shopping, the government went as far as to open garden centres alongside supermarkets. Several online plant retailers have seen the pandemic cause a sales boom, and local businesses say they ramped up their deliveries.

In the US, in a matter of two days back in March, online sales jumped 25 percent, as ABC News reported. Online grocery shopping was the main driver, but a rise in sales of homeware contributed to the increase too. Unfortunately, a global brand like The Sill that was born online and noted a 5 million dollar revenue in 2018 with 70 percent of its sales coming from online purchases, is not the norm. “Garden centres and furniture designers may have been the categories that were the least prepared for a near-total switch to e-commerce, but these recent developments might just be the push they needed for digital innovation and realising this growth potential”, Lina says. We already touched on the urgency of digitalisation in the fashion industry in a previous article, but it is clear that other categories like home interior would benefit from such innovative solutions too.

Whether the pandemic will have a lasting impact on people’s growing love for houseplants is but the question. “Big trends are born from big events, like what happened with the important American trends post 9/11. Now, we will speak of the post Covid-19 trends in the consumer world. However, it is too early to say what those exact shifts will be”, Lina concludes. “Will this crisis be long and deep enough to sustainably integrate these new habits? Or will we just return to our old ones?” As we previously wrote in our DNA of Trends article: Brands need to keep their finger on the pulse of societal developments in order to evolve. Read more about the world of trends and how to implement change here.