Pandemic Delivers a Bloom Boom for Plant Shops

Like many small business owners, Yuri Kim has seen a lot of highs and lows during the pandemic. She received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan for her San Jose plant shop, Fractal Flora, in May, which helped pay the rent for a few months, but she had to lay off her six part-time employees.

"Should I even continue this business, or does it make more sense to just close it down?" Kim said she asked herself, repeatedly. "I'm so happy that I have an opportunity to still be here."

Fractal Flora was part of San Jose's Moment program, a small-business incubator in the city's downtown that provides subsidized rent in converted garage spaces in San Pedro Square. After two years, the shops have to move out and find their own spaces. As her involvement with Moment rolled to a close, Kim was able to open a new store just a few miles away in the Rose Garden neighborhood of San Jose.

During the first few months of the pandemic, Kim was selling less than what she was last year. But as the year wore on, sales slowly started to pick up.

"As you spend more time home and you're less able to go outside, you want to make your space comfortable and beautiful," Kim said. "Even the suppliers we purchase our plants from say their business has been better now than pre-pandemic because the interest in plants has grown so much."

The sudden demand for succulents and pothos plants is no surprise to Rob Shibata, the owner of Mt. Eden Floral Company, one of the largest floral wholesalers in the Bay Area.

"The millennials have shown a lot of interest in green plants," Shibata said. "They're apartment dwellers. They don't have a lot of space, but they want to have something alive and meaningful to keep them company."

That said, even though Mt. Eden Floral Company has benefited some from the boom in plant sales, the 114-year-old company specializes in flowers. Shibata makes most of his money on orders for weddings, banquets and other large events that won't be permitted for the foreseeable future.

"We have enough business to subsist," Shibata said. "But we're missing that event part to make us whole."

Shibata is waiting on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, two of the biggest days of the year for the flower industry, to bring a bump to sales. In the meantime, he's hoping people continue to buy flowers.

"I kind of had this imaginary conversation with my dad," Shibata said. His late father ran the company before he died in 2015. "And I heard him say, 'Well, [the pandemic] is not like the problem we had.' "

Shibata's father ran the company during the 1940s and World War II. In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, including Shibata's father, were sent to concentration camps in California and beyond.

"He [would say], 'When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the government came and we were forced to leave our business behind with one week's notice and leave our homes behind with one week's notice ... that was a problem,' " Shibata said. "As terrible as it is for us, it wasn't like ... what they went through."

Given that, Shibata says he's determined to get Mt. Eden Floral Company to its 115th year of service.