Two years ago today, we hit publish and held our breath
Two years of growing this with you
Two years ago today, on the first of August, we opened Inspired Garden Life. Two people at a kitchen table in Springfield, Missouri, with a garden out back and no earthly idea whether anyone would want what we were making. We put our first advertisement into the world that morning and then did what gardeners do, which is stare at the thing and wait. Someone bought a shirt that same day. We still talk about it.
Two summers on, the lesson has been the opposite of what we expected. We thought we were starting a shop. What actually happened is that a few thousand people who talk to their tomatoes found each other, and we get to stand in the middle of it. You have sent us photographs of your first harvests and your worst ones. You have told us which shirt you wore to a funeral and which one you wore to a wedding. None of that is in a business plan. All of it is the reason we are still here.
And here is the answer to the question we asked you back in July. We wondered aloud whether we might cross eleven thousand mangrove trees planted together by this anniversary, one tree for every shirt, all of them on the Kenyan coast through our partner Eden Reforestation Projects. We did. That number is not ours. It is the sum of a great many ordinary orders placed by people who wanted a shirt and quietly planted a coastline instead. Thank you. Truly. And because a thank-you ought to have something in it: you have $6.94 in store credit sitting there with your name on it. Good on anything in the shop, no minimum, through next Tuesday. Use code K7VD3 at checkout, and every shirt puts one more tree in the ground.
P.S. If it is only the trees you came for, you can plant a mangrove for $2.00 and skip the shirt entirely: https://inspiredgardenlife.com/products/sprout-impact-v2 . Two years in, that page is still our favorite thing we have ever built.
