Flip and Flop: Plant Flippers
I hate to tell you, but the plant I sold you wasn’t always the easygoing angel you have in your collection today… that plant was a little bitch when I got it. I brought it back to life, coaxed it out of it's moodiness and convinced it to thrive. You didn’t put the work in, I did.
Importing plants woke me up to the underbelly of the plant community: flippers. On average, I make $0.00 on my imports and often come out negative as I don’t tend to charge my customers for the shipping and phyto certificates that are additional costs to me on top of the plant, itself. Why? Because I want to make plants more accessible. I can’t change the world, and I can’t stop the nation-wide problem that has become plant flipping, but I can control my own sales. I can charge fair prices and grant wishlist plants to those who could otherwise never afford it. I abide by my own set of rules when it comes to sales, and those rules are dictated by my morals, my core values. Plants are for everyone, not just those who can afford the current (ridiculous) prices.
What is plant flipping? Plant flipping is when you buy a plant for a bargain, and then turn around and sell it again for more than you paid. This isn’t talking about the plant you had to have and then changed your mind about (but come on, sell it for what you paid in that case!) or plants you bought and suddenly can’t afford to keep. This is talking about people who are buying plants low with the sole intention of selling them for a major profit.
You can imagine that myself, and others like me, are becoming wary of offering our plants (either from our personal collections, or imports) at the low end of the market or below. We are all doing our best to combat the rising prices of these green gurls, and we’re being met with a 50/50 mixture of people who are grateful, and those who have dollar signs in their eyes. It’s disheartening that the plants we’ve taken months, years, to grow into beautiful specimens are being taken, chopped to bits and sold as scraps for 3x what we sold the entire plant for.
You didn’t put the work in, I did. I am the one who carefully selected each plant from another country. I am the one who paid sometimes thousands of dollars to get them here. I am the one who invested in different potting mediums, a greenhouse, heat mats, and countless other things that these babies need. Once they arrive, think of me the as the planty ER, the trauma nurse, consider my home the intensive care unit. These plants are shocked from being ripped out of their homes and sent on a plane, train, and automobile. They are not the prettiest, their roots are usually trash, and we always, always lose leaves. A lot of them. Sometimes all of them and we’re left with naked stumps and have to wait for them to regrow, in their own time.
Imports have to start from square one most of the time. They need to establish new roots, they need to be regrown, they need time. Time is valuable, my time is valuable, and the level of stress and concern that comes with a new box of imports isn’t to be taken lightly. Sometimes, you lose everything in the shipment. I’ve had entire shipments show up rotted, a box of wet, smelly lettuce. Those ones are a complete loss to me, financially, if the seller doesn’t offer replacements, which a lot of them do not.
A lot of things go in to bringing something back from the brink of death, yet I stay making no money. That’s not what this is about, for me, and I’m saddened to see the plants I’ve so meticulously cared for be massacred for the sake of a dollar.
I ask you, flippers, what makes you so deserving of making a profit off of someone who is trying to show kindness to the community she so deeply adores? What have you done for that plant to make it more valuable than when I sold it to you 5 minutes ago? The answer is nothing. You are profiting off of the backs of others by stealing that plant from the hands of a true collector for what? A quick pay day? Does it make you feel powerful to take from those who have less to sell to those who have more? Well if that’s the case then I’m Robin Hood and you’re Prince John, sucking your thumb in a pile of gold with a crown that doesn’t quite fit.
I don’t want to hear how “everyone is allowed to make money” because this isn’t that. It’s not someone working hard to make a profit, it’s about being a vulture scouring for something to devour. Something to pick apart and consume. If you’re going to treat my kindness like a carcass waiting to be picked clean, you’re in for a real shock.
Blacklist, baby. Welcome to it. I can’t control if someone decides to sell my plant for a crazy profit, but I can control whether or not I sell to that person ever again. I’m done being nice and assuming the best, from now on you’re cut off. You can get a business license, an import license, you can find the sources and spend the hours and hours figuring everything out to make it happen. You can put in the work to keep them alive after 10 days in a box. You can spend the money up front. You can take the risk to reap the rewards and charge whatever you want as long as you do it, yourself.
I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, sometimes I’ll get burned and sometimes I won’t. All I know is that once you set me on fire, the whole bridge between us is going up in flames, too. Be gone, thot, I’ve got babies to find new homes for.
