Today we’d like to introduce you to Shane Maloy.
Hi Shane, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Plants have been part of my story since the very beginning. I grew up with our beloved family greenhouses in my childhood backyard and worked in and for the family business since I could walk. In 2017, I took over the family business from my dad, and in late 2018, I was introduced to the world of online plants, something that I was unaware of, considering we relied on a fax machine for wholesale orders, and I began selling some of the uncommon plants our family greenhouses had been growing for years online. That idea quickly blossomed into the next nearly 4 years of a whirlwind. —
Shane Maloy is a solid visionary and the 3rd generation owner of Gabriella Plants (previously Gabriella Growers), a family-owned tropical house plant nursery and retailer located in Oviedo, FL. He is responsible for Gabriella’s migration to an online, direct-to-consumer business strategy. Since 2018, Gabriella Plants has experienced remarkable growth in the past 4 years while shipping hundreds of thousands of high-quality house plants direct to those customers From Our Greenhouse to Your House®. Gabriella Plants has also begun heavily investing in developing internal grower technology to train, recruit, and power the next generation of tropical foliage growers.
Shane is married to his middle school sweetheart and has been a technology-minded entrepreneur since high school. His passions for plants, community, and growing individuals are pervasive throughout his work. When not at Gabriella, Shane can often be found behind an audio console in his church’s worship productions or tinkering with new cultivars in his backyard greenhouse.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It certainly wasn’t always easy nor is it easy today. When I started, the hardest thing was how to safely pack a plant so that it survives what could be thousands of miles in transit. It took several months and I’m thankful for those early customers who graciously gave feedback as we learned some lessons the hard way.
Greenhouses can also sound like a paradise, but in more than half of the year, the daily temperatures can exceed 105 degrees and it can be grueling and physically intense work. However, there hasn’t been any struggle that our team has not valiantly overcome and I could not be more thankful to our team or proud of their solutions to the challenges we face.
We’ve grown from 1 location, 2 part-time folks and less than 200 plants shipped a week to 4 locations, nearly 30 folks on the team, and thousands of plants shipped every week. It’s truly remarkable and it’s part of our motto; Always Growing More®!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Gabriella Plants?
Our mission is to grow high-quality vigorous house plants & ship them quickly and safely from our greenhouse to your house, with an unmatched customer experience.
We are a 3rd Generation Family Business that has been growing plants since the 1970’s on the same property we still grow house plants on today. We used to operate strictly wholesale before 2019, but since then, we have shifted entirely to serving our customers online.
High-quality soils, extended time-release granular fertilizer and locally sourced nursery pots means a better growing experience for the plants in our greenhouse and hopefully a smile on your face when your plants have arrived home.
We are also working on creating NEW plants to offer for people’s collections in the years ahead and so much more…
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I wouldn’t describe my financial risk tolerance as “all chips in” by any means, but at the same time, my actions since founding Gabriella Plants certainly supports the fact that I thrive in taking risks.
However, personally, I don’t seek finding “risks to take” but rather, have very little patience or desire to do something that’s been done before by someone else, whether or not it was successful for someone else. Integrity and uniqueness are two of my personal highest values in life.
So, I find myself dreaming big, inventing and innovating more than anything, which inherently means we’ve had recruit talent to help orchestrate development efforts to build our own apps and systems in house, like our Story Stake plant storytelling technology, and those investments are certainly a risk as that investment to date has not yet directly made the company any money.
Nevertheless, having a completely unique customer experience will pay dividends in how we stand apart from our otherwise fairly crowded industry.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gabriellaplants.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/gabriellaplantsonline
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GabriellaPlantsOnline
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GabriellaPlantsOnline
Image Credits
Gabriella Plants
