Today we’d like to introduce you to Skye Cooper.
Hi Skye, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Our journey began in 2020. During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself sequestered back home with my parents. My dad and I decided to take this opportunity to find safe and healthy ways to stay connected with our community during this dark period of social distancing. We started growing Microgreens for ourselves and then decided to share them with friends and family. When everyone was fearful for their health and spent hours at home cooking, we became passionate about cooking with Microgreens as they are a nutrient-dense food source that can be incorporated into many delicious dishes! Our friends and family loved receiving weekly Microgreens and started to spread the word about what we were doing. Soon, we started a subscription service delivering fresh Microgreens weekly. This inspired us to sign up for farmer’s markets in our local area. By the beginning of the summer, we were in five farmer’s markets, two grocery stores, and three restaurants. Regularly growing Microgreens enabled us to experiment and fine-tune our growing process, which led us to design our first Microgreens grow kit. We were excited to educate and provide the tools to empower others to grow nutritious baby vegetables! Designing our kit launched our e-commerce business, ‘Skyhaven Harvest.’
Skyhaven Harvest’s third business partner, Kim Lucero, lives in Portland, Oregon. Kim is our photographer, social media manager, and design collaborator. She also has her own professional gardening business, and we collaborate on garden design installations in both the Twin Cities and Portland area, amongst other locations around the country. Alongside Skyhaven Harvest, I run another small business called ‘The Painted Fern’ (@the.paintedfern) and partner with another LLC called ‘The Secret Gardener,’ run by Mieka Hoffman. The Painted Fern is a garden care and garden design LLC based in the Twin Cities. Mieka and I work with residential and business clients throughout the greater Twin Cities area to provide sustainable landscape design and maintenance.
Since we are professional gardeners, in 2021, it was only natural that we started to incorporate gardening tools into our online store. The tools we sell are the tools we use in the garden. Skyhaven Harvest soon transformed into an e-commerce store that provides excellent tools for gardening, pruning, and harvesting. We are committed to sourcing our products ethically and having as minimal environmental impact as possible. Our next goals are to incorporate our gardening design businesses with Skyhaven Harvest and offer both an online store and a brick-and-mortar shop, where we can host workshops and local events supporting a healthy community and environment.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We are an entirely self-funded business. We used the money we earned from our farmer’s markets to buy the components for our first kit. In addition to having limited financial resources, we needed more business and marketing knowledge when we launched our business. Everything we have done has been self-taught, which has felt empowering but can also feel incredibly daunting and overwhelming. We experimented with hiring outside sources with expertise in areas we needed clarification. Still, many times they were not reliable, did not understand our business, and often crippled us financially. We are proud to have worked through these struggles and have now been able to find incredible resources and help. Starting a business requires you to learn about every aspect of your business (whether you enjoy it or not) and surround yourself with supportive resources and a reliable team. My goal is to provide resources from my experience with other entrepreneurs starting their businesses to lend a hand further. I believe in ‘no-gate-keeping’ when it comes to sharing start-up knowledge, and the more we small businesses share and support each other, the better for all of us!
As you know, we’re big fans of Skyhaven Harvest. What can you tell our readers who might need to be more familiar with the brand?
At Skyhaven Harvest, we are gardeners, and we have farmed Microgreens. Everything we sell, we use. We curate every part of our store and products. We are a team of three; two of us are young women who also run our own professional gardening businesses and we aim to empower others to get out into the garden! We also continue to design new ways to bring gardening indoors with various grow kits and plant care items. We are primarily known for our high-quality Japanese gardening tools and aesthetic hydroponic growing kits. What sets us apart is that we are professional gardeners offering a combination of gardening tools and growing systems that can be used indoors and outdoors. We plan to continue growing our offerings, knowledge, and experience so that we can be a trusted resource for our customers. Last winter, during the holiday season, we began curating bundles of our products, which became incredibly popular for gifting. We love providing our customers with high-quality, highly functional, long-lasting, and sustainably packaged items. Our top priorities are to source ethically and keep a low carbon footprint while using the least amount of plastic possible. Everything we sell is meant to last a lifetime or be composted/recycled. Skyhaven Harvest is a small business and a passion project for me, my dad, and my best friend. We have grown and learned so much about ourselves and each other through our ups and downs. We have an incredible bond with each other, and it has been empowering to become entrepreneurs and people we never knew we could be. I am incredibly proud of how far we have come. We couldn’t have done it without each other, the support of our community, and our incredible customers.
We love surprises, fun facts, and unexpected stories. Can you share something that might surprise us?
Before the pandemic, I attended a graduate program at Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture, Taliesin, in Arizona. I started my career as an architect major, and my dad has been a professional musician for his entire life. Neither of us ever dreamed of owning a garden shop or becoming a gardener. The moment I realized I wanted to devote my life to plants and designing sustainable environments was also during the pandemic. One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design philosophies is Organic Architecture. He believed that a building should complement its environment to create a unified space that appears to “grow naturally” out of the ground. I spent most of my time in Arizona drawing and mapping out plants, studying their structure as if they were buildings. After the pandemic started and I was sent home, I would spend hours in my family’s garden to reduce stress (and kill time). One day, while in the garden, I realized that gardening is my Organic Architecture. I am passionate about refocusing humanity to grow the future. I want to help heal our relationship with the natural world and equip people to better interact with plants and farming. I wouldn’t be who I am today without gardening. I believe in the power of nature and the healing process of having relationships with plants. Skyhaven Harvest is a place that empowers people to grow and enjoy their harvest!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://skyhavenharvest.com
- Instagram: @skyhavenharvest
- Facebook: Skyhaven Harvest
Image Credits
All Images were styled and shot by Kim Lucero.
