Urban farming done easily with Blokgarden ready-made grow boxes and community
Providing one with fresh and clean food, utilising unused land in the cities and supporting sustainable living, urban farming has become a global trend. Blokgarden is making it easy and fun for everyone.
A few years back, sustainable living started to appear more frequently in the discussions of a group of friends living in Tampere. They talked about growing their own food and about the unused spaces in the common outdoor living areas around the city. After a while, they discovered a growing trend in consuming organic food and producing one’s own.
It can be difficult to start, a new home-grower can fail and get less motivated if they lack the information and also continued support in growing food.
With some of the members working in agriculture and others having experience running businesses, they started developing the idea of a service for new home growers, making it effortless and maximizing the success.
In early 2020, Blokgarden was founded in Tampere, Finland.
The team decided to go with an agile approach of making an MVP for this farming-as-a-service, and testing how it performs. They began with designing the boxes and deciding what plants go well together. From there, 6 different kinds of combinations were developed and sold through direct and online sales.
Their service providing pre-planted grow boxes, a mobile app that gives instructions and direct support. Besides. they have a Facebook group that for all “Blokgardeners” where they can post pictures, share experiences with their peers and also acted as a platform to ask general questions.
Starting their business just when COVID-19 came, at the end of spring 2020, a lot of orders got cancelled.
In response to the situation, they ran a paid marketing campaign which brought in new customers.
By summer, Blokgarden sold out all 122 boxes of their planned quota and ran a successful pilot.
“Our customers said that they get good crops easier than ever. Growing a Blokgarden is considered easy and fun. They are especially happy with the support they got as not all have green thumbs. Those feedbacks motivated us to continue what we are doing and proved that there is traction to the idea.” — Michel Faas, Sales Manager at Blokgarden
As winter is the low season for gardening, at their test facility, Blokgarden is testing new plants as well as exploring smaller size boxes. The team is also developing their app further aiming to make it a stand-alone version for growing anything anywhere.
“NSS has been really supportive, especially, the workshops have taken our business thinking to another level. Networking in real life would have been great, but in the current circumstances we are having a good experience how things are picked-up in moving everything online.
We want to have our grow boxes all over Finland and really build a community spirit around our product with a fully functional app that supports our home-growers. In 2 years we see us having an app that anyone can use to grow anything anywhere.” — Tuomas Ilander, CEO of Blokgarden
For more updates on our program and mentors follow us on Linkedin. Visit NSS website for more details of our programs.
