The plant is the point

Do We Really Need Better Soil?

I spend a lot of time thinking about dirt—obviously. But, lately I’ve been thinking about how good dirt actually needs to be.

Because—and maybe you've noticed it too—potting mix became another thing we decided needed a luxury category. It couldn't just drain well, hold the right amount of water, support biology, give roots somewhere comfortable to live, and generally do its job. It needed to be premium. Then more premium. Then apparently whatever comes after premium. Bespoke, maybe? Why?

And here I am wondering if a house plant can tell the difference.

Don't get me wrong. Bad potting mix exists. We've bought it. You've probably bought it. Sometimes you open a bag and immediately realize you've purchased a sack of disappointment.

But there's a difference between making something better and participating in an arms race nobody asked for. We know because, when we first launched our potting mix, we charged $28 for it.

And it sold.

The problem was that selling a $28 bag of potting mix required a certain amount of salesmanship that eventually made us uncomfortable. We had to spend too much time explaining why dirt cost $28. We had to talk about ingredients and benefits and all the wonderful little things happening inside the bag until, after a while, it started to feel like we were trying to convince people that buying expensive potting mix was somehow a mark of sophistication.

It isn't. It's dirt. Useful and necessary, but no one comes over for game night and is awestruck by biochar, Leca balls or pumice.

We know we have really good dirt. But it’s still dirt.

So, we did something businesses aren't generally encouraged to do—we lowered the price. Same product. Same attention to what goes into the bag. We just decided we didn't need as much money for it.

Today our 8-quart bag is $20.

Meanwhile, much of the premium soil category has continued marching in the other direction. REDACTED’s (you can probably guess) 8-quart bag is around $32. REDACTED’s runs higher still. And again, I'm not saying those are bad products. I'm sure there are perfectly happy plants living perfectly respectable lives in both.

I'm asking a much less convenient question: Does your plant know you spent the extra $15? Of course it doesn't. And we're starting to see the consequences of that pricing in stores.

Retailers tell us they are swapping those luxury brands for Classy Rabbit because store workers are tired of trying to justify a $32 bag of dirt. What's interesting is that they generally aren't telling us those products are terrible. Some have complaints about weight or moisture, sure, but that's not usually the thing that ends the relationship.

It's price.

The stuff just sits there. Slow sell-through. And retailer workers scrambling to justify it all.

That's an interesting problem for a product that's supposed to help people grow plants. You can formulate the most impressive potting mix known to civilization, but if someone picks it up, looks at the price, quietly puts it back down, and goes home without it, I'm not sure you've actually made the product better.

You've just made it more expensive.

And this is where I think our industry occasionally confuses excellence with excess. There is absolutely value in better ingredients, better structure, better biology, and thoughtful formulation. We believe that so strongly that we've built our company around it. But eventually the returns become pretty difficult to see anywhere except the price tag.

Our retailers are teaching us something our spreadsheets couldn't: People will pay for good soil. They just don't want to feel stupid doing it.

At the end of the day, the plant is the point. Not the dirt.

That's easy to forget when you make soil products for a living. You start obsessing over ingredients, sourcing, structure, biology, and whether you can squeeze another two percent of wonderful out of a bag. Those things matter. Obviously, we think they matter or we wouldn't in the game.

But they matter because they serve the plant.

And I think that's where the premium-product obsession gets a little weird. If every company is trying to make the greatest potting mix ever conceived by mankind, where exactly does this end? A $40 bag? $50? Perhaps someone will eventually employ a small Italian man to hand-select individual pieces of pumice, and we'll finally arrive at soil perfection.

Meanwhile, somebody just wants to repot the pothos they bought for $14.99.

That's the person we're interested in.

Classy Rabbit is a premium product, or at least our thousands of customers seem to think so. We use good ingredients and we're obnoxiously particular about how they work together. But we're not interested in racing toward some theoretical version of perfection that eventually prices ordinary people out of growing plants.

There's a point where good becomes good enough to stop messing with it. We'd rather meet people there. Make something excellent. Charge a fair price. Give the plant a really good place to live and leave enough money in your pocket to go have coffee with somebody.

After all, you bought the plant because you wanted a plant.