Subscription services for plants | Hacker News Reader

Subscription services for plants

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36 pointsjonbaer27 comments

I am not entirely sure how I feel about everything becoming a "subscription". On one hand, it is great for people new to an area to just jump right in, on the other, do we really need to pay someone to ship us plants every so often? Not just plants, but other things too. It is getting harder and harder to find something you can't get in subscription form.

I guess if it is working, keep at it. If anyone has the resources, a list outlining all these niche subscription services would be neat to see.

I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive but My Subscription Addiction[1] has 97 pages of available boxes. There’s everything from the aptly named “The Opulent Box”[2] a luxury jewelry subscription at the very unaffordable price of $25,000/month, to just about every “Dollar ____ Club” you could dream up. And, of course, everything in between.

[1] https://boxes.mysubscriptionaddiction.com/

[2] https://boxes.mysubscriptionaddiction.com/box/the-opulent-bo...

That's sad and funny. Props to you for finding a way to make a buck in that market without creating yet another box. Though you might be the best person to see there's not a subscription box for something, and create it yourself and start your own subscription box company.

Thankfully, it's not my site - the name just happens to be "My Subscription Addiction" and I suppose I'm more of a hate-follower than a fan. Like many other women in their early-20s I subscribed to Birchbox when it first came out ~2012. Eventually I cancelled and told friends that it kind of felt like low-stakes beauty sample gambling. Of course they thought I was nuts so I googled "subscription box gambling addiction" and stumbled upon this site.

None of my friends still have Birchbox subscriptions but following along on MSA I do think the boxes "target" a certain type of people/part of the brain. I get the impression there are a small number of people who spend a lot of money on several boxes as more of a hobby or entertainment than a convenience thing. They subscribe to a handful of boxes but only for 6-12 months before switching to a new box.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I bet a subscription box of random subscription boxes would actually do really well...

I think this subscription service could be useful to me to find what I like/what works for my home, end the service, then go purchase the plants I like.

The one subscription i've been tempted by is the Tiki Cocktail Box:

http://tikicocktailbox.co.uk/welcome.html

You get some bits for making tiki cocktails. Each box has the things for one cocktail, but as your collection grows, you get superlinear growth in the number of possible combinations. That, and the fact that the stuff in the box keeps for a good while but isn't immortal (assuming you can dispose of mugs somehow), means you shouldn't suffer from an overload of stuff. Also, it only comes every two months.

Sadly, it seems like it's on indefinite hiatus.

This seems silly?

a) Plants need to be carefully picked for their habitat/location/which room in the house etc

b) Plants need varying amounts of care

c) 1 a month quickly scales to unwieldy numbers if you are able to keep your plants alive, unless this is aimed at the disposable "fast fashion" part of plants?

That being said, indoor plants are the best. I can't help but feel like this is the equivalent of those fake/plastic plants though.

1 a month quickly scales to unwieldy numbers if you are able to keep your plants alive, unless this is aimed at the disposable "fast fashion" part of plants?

I've recently come to believe that most people are really bad at taking care of plants.

Those cute little tropical things at the garden center? If well-cared-for, they will grow into 8-foot-tall (a little over 2 meters) monsters that live for decades. There's no way there's a big market for 8-foot jungle plants. Even those tiny little Haworthias and Echeverias will start to outgrow their cute little nursery pots within a few months.

People must be keeping them in small pots, over/under-watering them, and never re-fertilizing the soil.

Case in point, when I broke up with an ex and she moved out, she took the Cycas because it was "hers". It had just started sprouting a new set of fronds. Those things are really easy to take care of -- just give it some water like every 2 weeks, give it light, don't let the cats chew on it. Within 3 weeks she had somehow managed to hurt the thing to the point where the new fronds had gone totally brown and soon withered away completely. My guess is she thought it looked dry and overwatered it. I eventually took it back and it's made a full recovery since then.

I hope you got full custody.

you're not the target market, which is people who want to be spoon-fed "safe" popular plant choices with instructions. I definitely think it's a viable market for a small business.

(I totally agree though, I suspect many of these plants will die in short order)

And either people will have enough plants and cancel, or they'll get sick of plants dying and move onto something else.

I think the only sustainable market is first-year college students. Small, drought-resistant, shade-tolerant plants for shelves and windowsills in a dormitory. Constant rotation of new people moving in every year. Could be a nice stable market.

This is also why plants are a questionable gift idea unless you ask the person first. I see a plant as a long-term responsibility that takes up space in my not-big apartment, so the ones I buy for myself are chosen carefully.

I bought a plant for my office about four years ago. Recently I was looking at it, and just thought “I don’t recall the like this anymore”. But what am I going to do? I can’t just kill my plant. I have no yard to put it in. It looks like we’re in for the long run.

SecondHome in Lisbon is a coworkspace famous for having many plants everywhere: https://secondhome.io/lisboa

Looks nice.

This has been a thing for a while here in Norway, at least - at a former employer, there was an almost absurd desire to outsource anything and everything; I quipped to a colleague that they'd probably do the office greenery next - only to be told by the janitor that the plants were indeed leased already.

Sigh. We had someone come by once a week to water the plants and restock the coffee machines.

This is nothing but an advertisement.

Honestly I think orchid subscriptions is the way to go. Send them out when they are just sprouting a flower stock then exchange them in a month or 2 after they are done and before the new owner kills them.

Someone's already doing something like that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/this-florist-s...

The moralizing about people's inability to keep plants alive seems strange to me - do they not deserve plants?

I don't know about moralizing, but to me it definitely seems like some sort of strange deficiency in those who can't remember to water a plant.

And yeah, if you routinely kill plants you don't deserve them. That's my opinion though: plants are incredibly kind and generous and they don't hold it against you if you forget to water them. They are so sweet and gracious. We should all try to learn from plants.

Thinking about it, no human deserves a plant. They don't need us at all, but we depend on them utterly, even for the very oxygen we breath. We take them for granted, kill them without regard, treat them as things, ignore our duties and responsibilities. No sir, no human deserves the kindness of plants. How could we? Their love and care for us, their willingness to support us even in our darkest hour, is a pure gift, a gracious mercy, undeserved.

Anthropomophising is cute, but not a great argument. How about "Plants try to kill us with poisons, toxins, by clogging our drains with their roots and uprooting our foundations. They are vicious, antagonistic life forms. Torture, kill them at your leisure!"

Not as cute, but just as valid.

Nah...

If you're being poisoned by a plant you're obviously eating the wrong part, eh?

And when they tear down our works they are but reminding us of our folly.

There are no "vicious, antagonistic" plants.

(Fair warning dude, you might not want to engage with me in re: plants, et. al. I'm a weirdo that believes in human-plant telepathy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants ...or don't, eh? To be sure some of what's in that book is BS, but not IMO the parts about communicating with plants. YMMV. Cheers.)

Agreed - there's no point at all in anthropomorphizing plants, for good or ill.

Interesting idea, and nice to see my hometown represented in the very first sentence.

That's all we need, a disposable plants service. I guess it's great for people who can't keep them alive longer than a month.

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