April 15, 2020
In 1966, our founder Naud Burnett had a vision for containerized ferns that prompted him to establish Casa Flora. Since then, we are honored to have played a major role in helping drive the phenomenal growth in the use of indoor and landscape ferns in the USA.
We’re both pleased and amazed to have surpassed our 54th birthday as a company, and we are grateful to all our customers for your support during all these years. Casa Flora has always tried to be simultaneously smart, innovative, and nimble as a company; this has required our perpetual evolution since our founding. We find these changes invigorating and look forward to continuing to adapt to new circumstances, like the current coronavirus challenge. We’re all facing that one together, which will surely drive changes in the industry and consumer landscape.
We’re writing now to let our valued customers know of some exciting new developments at Casa Flora.
About three years ago, we noted the growing popularity of indoor houseplants, which represents the arrival of Millennials as a major consumer demographic for the horticulture industry.
Millennials (and behind them, Generation Z, who are also now entering the American workforce) are already driving demand for more unique and unusual houseplants, including a resurgence of popularity of foliage plants.
It’s also important to understand the unique needs and preferences of these ultimate end-users of our products. Many Millennials and Gen Z live in dense urban areas with little or no outdoor growing space. As such, they need plants that thrive indoors. Beginning in mid-2017, we started early tissue culture trials of the most popular traditional foliage varieties and have since ramped up and expanded this TC production to include several newer and unique foliage plants that will surely appeal to the Millennial/Gen Z demographic. By early 2019 we began official sales of foliage plugs.
We’re also aware that Millennials / Gen Z have a different brand perception than previous generations, and we’ve been working with some of our key customers to brand these varieties in ways that will enhance their visibility and desirability with these new consumers. These new varieties include: Clean Air™, Urban Wild™, Metro Jungle™, Good Vibes™, and Primeval™. Given the changes in American society and consumer preferences, we think that Indoor is the new outdoors!
Some ferns of course do very well indoors as well as outdoors (not just the Boston types, but ferns such as Brilliance as well), so we’re simply formally announcing that we’re augmenting our traditional fern production line with these new foliage plants that will serve an additional segment of the horticultural market. We’re also continuing to work on hybrid ferns in our tissue culture laboratories, as well as scouring new sources in the USA and abroad to identify potential new ferns for the market.
Finally, we also see an increasing consumer preference for locally sourced food production, and so we’re also starting to dip our toes into growing herbs. Some varieties are already available, but we expect to develop more products in the herbal agricultural sector in the future. Stay tuned!
We thank you again for your support and look forward to serving all of you in the future.
Sincerely yours,
Naud Burnett II, Chairman Richard Lim, President
Burke Burnett, Vice Chairman
5543 McCommas Bluff Road
P.O. Box 41140
Dallas, TX 75241
800.233.3376
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