On Finding Grounding, Nurturing Your Business, and Starting A Garden with Anne Fletcher

Orta Kitchen Garden began as a dream to create tools that promote gardening and connect people to nature. In 2011, founder Anne Fletcher made the first self-watering seed pot as a solution to the problem of sustaining delicate herb seedlings on her kitchen counter. In her design, water is drawn as needed from the pot’s terracotta reservoir. After a year in her garage experimenting and teaching herself ceramics, she refined her dream into the Sixie Seed Pot, a responsibly-made product that is beautiful enough to display. Eager to align her professional life as a product designer with her environmental values, Anne started Orta Kitchen Garden.

Outside of perfecting her craft as a gardener and product designer, Anne also teaches customer research for entrepreneurship at both Sanford University and UC Berkeley. 

Key takeaways:

✿ Anne started her journey with Orta Kitchen as a true beginner gardner. She learned from failure and grew by teaching herself to get to the level of gardening she is at today. 

✿ Anne’s idea to create Seed Pots bloomed from a need to grow herbs and food that wasn’t available in her local markets - so she decided to grow them herself!

✿ Anne details her process of product designer and the development of her unique Seed Pot innovation

✿ “Nobody's competing with us directly. Specifically what we do, we're the only ones that do it and have been for ten years” Find an untapped market that products don’t exist in yet that fills a need for folks, then start your product design journey

✿  “I think it's actually a powerful entrepreneurship practice to have self-care routines.”

✿ Being an entrepreneur is hard! But that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. Anne tells us that having a plant to care for helps entrepreneurs by creating a grounding practice to rely on 

Anne is offering GGC Listeners a FREE Self-Watering Seed Pot when they sign up for her newsletter! 

Sign up here: https://mailchi.mp/a62be2371ecb/1p71voi3b1

Follow @ortagardens on instagram and go to https://ortakitchengarden.com/ for all offerings

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