Firm's gardening kits win contest, funding and sales; Earth Starter, launched by UM grads, sells the 'paint by numbers' of gardening
Image Credit: Edwin Remsberg
(NOTE: The Following article appeared in The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday, September 3)
Earth Starter is having the sort of year startups dream of.
The company, founded by University of Maryland graduates, sells a kit designed to make gardening easy in small spaces. You lay the 4-by-6-foot mat on your plot of dirt, push the provided seed balls through the mat's holes and water them with the included drip irrigation system.
Since Jan. 1:
•The mats came to market — for sale online, up to $80.
•The company won first place, and $52,500, at a national business competition held at the University of Maryland.
•And the founders raised over $100,000 on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to expand their manufacturing operation — 50 percent more than their original goal.
It's been a good year, if exhausting.
"I'm just recovering from Kickstarter, I kid you not," co-founder Phil Weiner said last week, a month after that fundraising campaign wrapped up. "I became addicted to caffeine and sweets and chocolate, and I was crying under my desk some days."
Weiner, 26, earned an economics degree from UM in 2011; co-founder John Gorby, 25, got his environmental science and technology degree there the same year. They started working on their product then, founded the company in 2012 and are now running it from both coasts — Earth Starter is in a three-month program with a San Francisco business accelerator.
So far this year, they've moved their manufacturing operations from a basement in Potomac to a sliver of a warehouse in Frederick to a basement in Hunt Valley. Now, Kickstarter funding in hand, they're shopping around for a production facility in the Baltimore region.
As if that wasn't enough change, Weiner and Gorby just decided to rebrand, using feedback from Kickstarter backers. They're changing the company's name this week to UrbnEarth and the product to Urbmat from Nourishmat, and redesigning it to fit in smaller — urban — spaces.
Weiner said he had his "aha" moment, the initial idea for the gardening kit, in a sustainable farm management class his senior year. He immediately emailed Gorby, who later made the first prototype.
Dale Johnson, the course's teacher and a farm management specialist with University of Maryland Extension, is an enthusiastic supporter.
"It's one of those things — 'well, why didn't I think of this?'" Johnson said. "You have a mat that the weeds can't get through, so you don't have to weed it. You have the irrigation built in. … You take these seed balls, these clay seed balls, push them into the soil, and that clay actually absorbs water so the seeds germinate better. It's easy to plant, it's easy for anybody to do. You roll it out and you grow your garden. It's just a great idea."
And while it might seem aimed at beginners, Johnson knows longtime gardeners who like it. His sister, for example.
"I gave it to her last winter, and she put it in this spring," he said. "It's the best part of her garden."
The company calls it "paint by numbers — for gardening."
