The Sill

Our Founding Story

Founder and CEO Eliza Blank grew up surrounded by nature. Her childhood home was bursting with plants nurtured by her mom, and she spent summers gardening in their backyard in Western Massachusetts. When Eliza moved to New York City in her early 20s,  she found herself craving the same comfort of nature and began filling her room with the few plants she could find at the grocery store.

But the selection was sparse and no one was providing care advice. She ended up going from one shop to the next to get everything needed to pot a single plant — only to watch it die in her dark apartment.

Eliza's passion for plants and frustration with the urban plant-buying experience made her keen to create a one-stop solution for folks looking to bring a little bit of life to their homes. This presented the perfect opportunity to modernize a truly antiquated market that's today still ripe for disruption.

Founded in 2012, The Sill broke new ground as an online plant delivery business and has since grown to include eight retail locations in five states and a best-in-class online experience that includes educational workshops and plant care advice.

"I became passionate about plants, setting out to demystify them, making them accessible to a novice, while elevating the experience beyond the local garden center." —Eliza Blank, Founder & CEO

We Are Driven By A Clear and Simple Mission: Plants Make People Happy.

Our guiding principle is simple: Plants Make People Happy. Our mission is to restore people’s connection to nature through plants. We sell houseplants — beautiful live, preserved, and faux plants — and encourage the lifestyle that surrounds them, allowing folks to tap into their creative and self-expression through home decor.  

The Sill provides an all-encompassing, "one-stop" solution to the indoor plant consumer, serving as the category creator in a field that had never been merchandised or marketed to before: simplifying the often-challenging process of purchasing and properly caring for plants.

The Sill delivers quality, variety, and convenience in an industry which has failed to deliver on the fundamentals of merchandising.

One of our Free Community Workshops, hosted on Zoom in 2020. While we've returned to running in-person workshops, we've kept the online option as well so we can serve Plant Parents all over the world.

In addition to live workshops, The Sill also offer a collection of free, on-demand, self-guided courses to help new Plant Parents learn the ins and outs of plant care.



We Are The Go-To Omni-Channel Houseplant Brand

The Sill has successfully opened and operated strong brick-and-mortar locations across the country, embodying a portable and capital-efficient store model with compelling unit-level economics. Stores aren’t just another venue to sell product— they’re community spaces to host workshops, listening posts to develop the product line, and acquisition tools to drive user-generated content and word-of-mouth.

The Sill store in Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Opening Day at The Sill in WeHo neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in 2019.

We Are Going After A HUGE, Expanding Market

The Sill is perfectly positioned to capitalize on enduring secular trends in a massive, fragmented, and ever-expanding market.

Our Point of Difference Is A True Moat

• A winning omni-channel strategy, combining a cutting-edge online platform and a proven store model with deep customer connectivity.
• Differentiated, robust, and editorialized high-quality plant offerings, serving all types of skill levels and lifestyles.
• Engaged and loyal high-value consumers that love the brand; The Sill has created a true community and customer-centric ecosystem.
• Compelling unit economics and expanding margins.
• Multiple attractive levers to drive continued rapid growth with vast untapped opportunities.
• Visionary, founder-led senior team with a cultural engine equipped to execute a robust growth strategy.

We've Grown (Like Our Plants!)Our Customers are Super Fans!

The Sill's customers absolutely love the brand and what we stand for: quality, sustainable products, insightful and educational content, and a nurturing community that inspires a healthy, nature-centric lifestyle.

The Sill featured in The New York Times (2018)

Cultivate New Growth ... Together

Garden Centers and Mass Merchants lack the level of service and clienteling to develop meaningful insights, engagement, and loyalty amongst customers. And our connection doesn't stop with the purchase

The Sill offers value beyond the product via extensive, best-in-class customer support, an ongoing two-way dialogue, and community to keep customers engaged and coming back.

The Sill launched in 2012 with a humble Kickstarter. More than 10 years later, our vision, mission, and values remain the same and our model for growth rests on the community now more than ever. The digital advertising landscape and economic landscape have changed, yet we know that community is a business model we can count on. 

• Our focus will remain on cultivating community, customer engagement, and brand evangelism
• We will prioritize existing customers
• We will invest in co-creation, which shows up as customer listening, innovation, and experience
• We will deliver on the values that matter most to you — our partners

Our commitment to building The Sill with and for Plant Parents made an opportunity to raise from our community (thanks WeFunder!) the clear choice. The Sill will continue to succeed if the people who are supporting the business are owners of it, too. We want our customers to not only receive the benefits that come from co-creating this brand — but also share in the financial upside.

With you, in this next era, we can keep marketing costs low, our ideas for growth fresh, our community growing, and our business self-sustaining.

We’re delighted that Andrew Mitchell, Founder of Brand Foundry Ventures, is leading our community round, and we're even more excited to enable thousands of others — like you! — to invest alongside this group. 

We want to make it clear, however, that just because you can invest in The Sill, it doesn’t mean you should. Investments are risky — especially in start-ups and small businesses. Even though The Sill is more than ten years old, only about 30% of small businesses make it as far as we have and the future is always uncertain.

That said: If, however, you share our belief that The Sill can grow its financial impact alongside its cultural impact, then this investment could be for you. 

Our vision is clear and our mission is meaningful. We’d love to have you by our side as we continue to build The Sill together. 

The Future is Green, The Time is Now

• Competitors in the space are losing steam given the volatility of the past few years.
• Customers want to see sharper prices, undercutting remaining players ability to sell online.
• Customers want experiences that provides both physical interaction with products & people and fulfills their new (post-COVID) “digitally-centric” expectations. 
• The Sill's brand is outsized. We’re garnering more attention than can be serviced. Our goal will be to co-create with this community to further expand our positioning, price points, and distribution to complete our flywheel and capture an even wider base of customers.

Let's Grow Together! Invest Today.