From the Runway to The Garden: Model turned horticulturist shows it’s never too late to change.
A conversation with Summer Rayne Oakes and Hannah Phang on taking chances and following your passions.
As an entrepreneur with a background in botany, Summer Rayne Oakes has been working on creative solutions that address a number of different environmental challenges. For the last 11 years, she has been flexing her green thumb in her 1,200-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, where she grows more than 500 plants.
She’s also Kickstarting a project called: How to Make a Plant Love You, an online-audiovisual course + experience to help you demystify plant care, learn how to have a better relationship with your plants, and guide you to create the indoor jungle of your dreams:
We talk to Summer about horticulturist classes, the Foodstand app and her sugar-free detox workshops.
Hannah: So, I know you’ve kind of been at this intersection of sustainability with creativity, fashion, food, art and health. To start off, could you just give me an overview of some of your recent projects and tell us what you’re working on right now?
Summer: Of course. I think the main threads through my work have always been health, wellness and sustainability. I usually find my way to a project by thinking about the things that connect us on a daily basis. I think about what we eat, what we wear and what products we put on our bodies. Then, I think about how to incorporate sustainability into the picture. So, my work has been defined by focusing on those aspects of our daily existence that connect us as human beings, whether it be through health and wellness or fashion and style, all the while maintaining sustainability as a throughpoint.
I would say that the first good ten years of my life were really spent on that intersection of sustainability as it relates to fashion and beauty. Those two industries are very disparate, but they also overlap with one another in various ways. This intersection gave me the opportunity to do some interesting things. By working with companies as a consultant as well as the model for their brands, I found myself in a very unique position that not many people, even to this day, operate in.
As a female founder of Source For Style (a B2B marketplace, now called Le Souk), and then also writing a book on sustainability in fashion, “Style Naturally,” those things kind of helped jump-start the sustainable fashion industry. Then, about four years ago, I stepped more into the world of food. And it was like a new adventure for me. You have to always ask yourself, “What’s different? What’s new and exciting?” For me, the fashion world, in a way, ran its course. It became less challenging, or, perhaps, a little less interesting. I always felt like it was one aspect of me, but I didn’t see it as the only thing I would do for the rest of my life.
I welcomed a new challenge and entered the world of sustainability through food. I helped launch a couple venture-backed, startup food companies — some with less success compared to a few of the other things that I have done. But they still exist, and they’re still going. It was a lot of solid learning experience. I thought, naively, that I knew a little bit more about the world of food than I actually did. I found out that it was a much more isolated industry than I had originally believed. I thought there would be a lot more crossover from what we wear into what we eat, but they really are two different worlds. Not many people had worked between the two industries, so I kind of just found my own way.
The first project that I looked at was how to get more organic, local, farm-fresh food to people’s doors in the city. That allowed me to start thinking about food, and I took a closer look at what I was eating. One of the things that I always felt held me back from reaching optimal health was my sweet tooth.
If somebody says, “Oh, wow. You worked in sustainable fashion. And now, you’re the author of this book, ‘SugarDetoxMe?’ Those things feel very disparate.” But for me, it’s all connected. What we put into our bodies, what the industries are putting into our foods, how that then makes us feel — it’s all part of the greater whole.
Like I said, it’s just one piece of the many different interests that I have as a person. So, that really manifested itself as a website, sugardetox.me, where people could do a 10-day or 30-day guided cleanse. It also led to the book that I just came out with in March, called “SugarDetoxMe.” It’s really a recipe book and guide to help people on their journey reduce or eliminate sweet stuff, as well as become more active in the broader scope of their lives.
So, not just taking advantage of what they can do within their home, but becoming savvy enough and maybe even fed up to the point where they take action. Whenever I become angry about certain things, I usually try to get active about it. Otherwise, I just try to tune things out, because there are a lot of things that one can get angry about, but you can’t be shooting on all cylinders at once.
My book came out in March 2017. What I didn’t expect was for my house to go viral mid-last year. And it has been for a year and running. Due to the excitement of living with houseplants and what that kind of means to people, I launched Homestead Brooklyn, which is nothing more right now than a blog, Instagram and YouTube account to help people reconnect to nature through very simple things, whether that’s a potted plant or a walk in the botanical gardens.
Since February, I’ve written almost 60 blog posts and put out 22 YouTube videos, called Plant One On Me, where I just take people’s questions on plants and answer them. It’s gathered quite a bit of a following so far. It’s been exciting, launching that and seeing that grow.
It’s not a business yet. It may never become one. But a lot of these things start off as projects, and then you kind of throw spaghetti on a wall, and you see what sticks. Anyway, that’s kind of in a nutshell, what I have done in the last few months.
Q: Wow. I have so many follow up questions. Let’s start from where you just left off with Homestead Brooklyn. You said something really interesting about it being a way to talk about reconnecting with nature. As New Yorkers, we’re literally in the concrete jungle. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on how we got to a point of being so disconnected from nature, the value of reconnecting and your advice on getting started on that journey.
I think the place that I’m most comfortable in is not speaking for anybody else, but speaking for myself. You know, I came to this city because of opportunity. What I mean by opportunity is that I believe this city affords me the ability to become the person that I aspire to be. But I needed to have other like-minded people and energies around me in order to create that person.
When I was in university, I was kind of “playing around.” Seriously playing, but playing around with this idea of sustainability in fashion. And I had no idea where that was going to lead. In fact, my sophomore year of college I thought I was going to be working on large-scale, ecosystem-based management projects that maybe would involve multiple countries, or groups within countries, and trans-boundary issues — that type of stuff. I always felt like I was going to be working on big projects and navigating those waters.
There wasn’t language around becoming the “eco-model.” I didn’t know what that was. No one else knew what that was. I kind of equate it to the fact that most of the jobs that we’re going to be in haven’t even been created yet.
So, if I told someone that I was going to be an “eco-model,” I wouldn’t expect them to know what that means. But, I could explain, “Well, it’s somebody who has values and who models with those values.” It made sense to me.
Why would I represent a company or an organization that I didn’t believe in? I’m not an actress. I’m a person who’s representing a specific brand, and that should feel genuine and authentic to me. That’s how I feel everything should go, whether you’re using your face or using your talents as a mechanic, or as a person in advertising, or as a consultant, or whatever. I felt like New York was the right place for me to be able to exercise my creativity.
Q: Can you provide a bit of background about your education and how that led you to modeling?
I got a B.S. in natural resources from Cornell, but since then I think they changed the name to environmental science. People seem to understand that a little more. Natural resources is kind of an old term. I also earned a minor in entomology, which is the study of insects. About three years into college, I started commuting to New York to work in the fashion industry. I also proposed a couple of my own classes that dealt with fashion and sustainability.
I had a great advisor, and Cornell really gives that flexibility to be able to propose your own class. I had the freedom early on to be able to do that. My professors really responded to that, because they wanted to see me thrive in an area that was outside the box. I’m grateful for my time at Cornell. I was actually just up there last week researching for a new book. It was really wonderful to see some of my professors from the time of yore.
To answer your previous question, I think that New York was the place for me to be also because of the fashion industry. It really exists here. If you’re going to do something in fashion, you have to be able to do it in New York City, really nowhere else.
If I think about it, I was a kid of nature. Now, if I could have a backyard, of course I would take that. But that’s just not really an option here. Cities didn’t necessarily grow with urban planning in mind, and so you just kind of accept the situation that you’re in.
Luckily, humans are pretty malleable. But I really do think that we kind of came out of the Garden of Eden, so to speak, and our beautiful garden has now become four walls. And that’s very inhuman or inhumane. But because we’re flexible, and we’re resilient and we’re malleable, we can deal with it to a certain degree, but we’re not necessarily always thriving.
Even if you have a ton of money in New York, it’s very, very hard to have a high quality of life. Whereas, if you’re fairly well off in places like San Francisco, there is a sensibility that you could be near the ocean, or be in Muir Woods or be in the mountains very quickly. That might even be some of your backyard. But with New York, you have to get a little bit further up the food chain, I think, in order to have that.
Then, you realize that you stay here because of the way people think. You don’t stay here because of the buildings or living space or anything like that. What I’ve been able to create in my living space though is a place like an oasis that serves as a center of calm in a very hectic city. I often share with people that your lifestyle is what you surround yourself with and the people that you surround yourself with.
With Homestead Brooklyn, my goal is not to just get people to have house plants but to help them understand their relation to the broader aspects of the world. The mission that I want to create with Homestead Brooklyn is not just look at what you can surround yourself with in your home. It’s here’s how you can actually create a better community in which you live, and hopefully people around you will benefit from that. It’s a subtle message, but you always have to have a road in for people to understand, and sometimes that starts with a house plant.
The whole fashion thing, it was the hook that reeled people in. And I made very sure that people wouldn’t just take me or my ideas for face value, that I spoke up a lot. That benefited me most of the time, but not always. I’d rather speak up and share my vision of the world, than stay silent and do something that isn’t fitting to me as a person.
Q: Amazing. It sounds like that’s something you thought about a lot with your book as well — that connection between the personal decision to live more connected with nature and the larger impact, whether in your community or on an environmental, global scale.
What I find, and what I’m sure a lot of people who work in the world of sustainability and environmentalism find, is that what’s really challenging is making the connection between something like climate change and its impact on me, as an individual. It sounds like you’ve started to do that, whether through personal health with “SugarDetoxMe” or now with Homestead Brooklyn. I would love to hear your thoughts on continuing to make those connections between personal benefit and global change.
Well, I feel like people have to see a solution that can work for them. I try to always hook the greater thing to tactical solutions that people could do in the home or in their lives that really work for the modern day man and woman. I could speak about it through a very articulate example in “SugarDetoxMe.”
I started out doing this specifically for me. It was very selfish. You know, I had a sweet tooth. I wanted to figure out how to resolve it. I put up a blog for the idea that if somebody read it, it would at least keep me honest, because I’m a terrible journaler. Lo and behold, people did read it, and so it kept me a little more active. It did what it was supposed to do — it kept me honest.
When I realized other people were going through the same issues, I was like, “Well, this works for me, but let me test it on other people.” I really went into research mode. I’m a big believer in just testing, testing, testing, doing market research, seeing if this actually even makes sense. You might learn a lot along the way, but you don’t want to waste too much of your time, your precious time. Put in that work in the beginning versus just trying to, you know, do stuff right away.
An example that came to be with “SugarDetoxMe” was when I was working in the farm-to-fridge grocery delivery service. People had this assumption that local, organic food was more expensive. That was their perception, even though that wasn’t necessarily the reality. So, I would talk to those folks and say, “OK. Well, tell me what you typically eat. Great. Let me put these 10 items in your basket, and I’m sure you have these 10 pantry staples already in your homes, like onions, and garlic, and salt and pepper. I could teach you how to make eight or nine different recipes, and you’ll be spending less than $3 a serving on your meals. So, no more than 50 bucks or so in your grocery cart.” All of a sudden, you have local, organic, fresh food with recipe plans for less than what you could get at a fast food restaurant.
You have to break people’s perception that it’s prohibitive. You have to be savvy enough to understand that not everybody is going to be in the same place you’re at, whether financially, or psychologically or culturally. There’s all sorts of things that might prohibit that. Of course when you’re talking about food, especially local and organic food, that’s a particularly culturally and financially sensitive topic.
The book now features 10 Meal Maps. Meal maps are meal plans, recipes and shopping lists all in one. It was just the same premise that I shared with you earlier, whereby it says, “Here are the pantry staples that you probably already have. If you don’t, you can put them on the shopping list. Here are your fresh ingredients. There are like 10 to 15 of them. Go to the store. That’s all you’re going to get. Just take a photo of the lists that are in the book. Here are eight to 12 different recipes that you’re going to make out of it.” It tackles affordability. It tackles food waste. It tackles not having a plan. All those things that I think I’m personally passionate about.
It’s meant to be accessible to everyone. I don’t want anybody coming back to me and saying, “Well, I have a metabolic disorder, but I can’t afford to be healthy. I can’t afford that expensive meal delivery service.” If you can afford fast food and you can afford to spend 10 to 15 minutes in your kitchen, then you can afford to do this for yourself. Of course, that’s just one challenge. There’s also the behavioral shift. There is the psychological shift. There are a lot of different challenges that a person can be up against. But if you, as a creator of this program, start to think through all of those different things, then you will be better able to answer those questions.
I kind of equate it to starting a company. If you’re an entrepreneur, what’s one of the things you have to do in order to get investors? Well, you have to analyze the risks for those investors. You have to have answers to those risks before you actually present your company. You have to say, “Well, this company could actually release a product or a service just like mine, and here’s how I’m going to handle it.” It shows that you’ve put some foresight and some thought into it. That investor is going to feel much more comfortable if you’ve thought through the risks, because you don’t want to be there hemming and hawing about something that you’ve never thought about.
“SugarDetoxMe” is about empowering people on an individual level, and connecting them to the greater whole. Part of that also comes with language. A woman who read the book came up to me and was like, “I really feel so strongly about the language that you used in the book, because so many books made me feel guilty about who I am and how I am as a person and that I shouldn’t be eating these things. You’re speaking from a standpoint of like being my best friend.” That’s important for people. If you’re overweight and you go to the gym, you don’t want to go to the gym to be berated. You want to be motivated and you want to be supported.
It’s the same thing with climate change. People can’t go and say, “You shouldn’t be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing that.” No one wants to hear that. People want to hear solutions, and sometimes the solutions are really hard to imagine. And sometimes the solutions are the things that are only at the end of the documentaries.
The solution is like the last five minutes of the documentary to make you feel somewhat good, after you’ve listened to an hour and 45 minutes of the problems. No. It should be five minutes of the challenges and an hour and 45 minutes of the solutions, so people really understand the blueprint for how they can address it in their daily lives. And then maybe once I do it for myself, I get so excited to say, “You know what? This has really worked for me. You should try it too.”
Q: I would love to jump back for a second to your metaphor of being an entrepreneur and analyzing risks before asking for investment. You mentioned earlier that some startups you worked on in the past few years haven’t succeeded in the same way some of your other projects have. Could you speak about those startups that didn’t succeed? Was it challenges related to business, or did you feel the mission and purpose was what hindered them?
Well, I wouldn’t say that they weren’t successful. I helped launch them, but I didn’t launch them myself, just to clarify that. With the farm-to-fridge grocery delivery service, Good Eggs, and then with Food Stand, which is an app to help people eat better. You know, whenever you start a business, it’s hard. Most businesses don’t survive past seven years. I’m happy to say that Source For Style, Le Souk, was started in 2009. It’s now 2017. It’s kind of beyond that mark.
Each business has its own challenges. Good Eggs still exists in the Bay Area, but it’s hard to operationally make those things work. The last mile in food delivery, I think people are still trying to figure it out. No one has it exactly right. It’s sometimes a question of how much money you have, and is that money running out, and can you figure out your operational challenges before that wick comes to an end? Generally speaking, that was one of the biggest challenges with Good Eggs, especially because they had a quick ramp-up where they launched in four cities. They had to determine that, “Hey, we’re not a tech company. Even though tech is a big part of it, we’re really a food company. We’re a logistics, an operational company.”
Food Stand had to go through some pivots of saying, “Well, what does this product look like? Do we have enough users to be able to ask is this working for folks? How are we going to get that user base?” These are some of the challenges, especially because apps are really saturated these days. Maybe they weren’t five or six years ago, but they are today. You have to really stand out of the crowd and have something that’s sticky. But then you have to compromise with this idea of, “Is this truly adding value to people’s lives, or am I just trying to suck people into spending time on an app for my investors?” Those are struggles that entrepreneurs have to deal with on a daily basis, professional as well as ethical struggles.
Both companies exist. I wouldn’t say that they were less successful or more successful. They have different challenges. It’s really hard to compare them.
Q: That makes me think of your other point about perception being prohibitive. Being in a sustainable business world, have you ever found the perception of sustainability to be something that hinders growth?
First of all, I think sustainable business is a little bit of an oxymoron in this current state. We have this perception of scarcity, and that inhibits and prohibits us from being the fullest human beings that we possibly can be. If we really looked at and shed everything else outside of our lives and asked ourselves what we would be doing now if we had no limitations, no restrictions, chances are it’d be something very different than what you are doing now.
Q: I find that a lot of people interested in or working in sustainability didn’t know they were going to go down this path. There’s often one moment or insight or reason behind how they got started. Could you share where your interest sparked from?
I feel like I was one of the blessed ones who always knew. I was very much interested in art growing up, but all of my art was inspired by the work of Edward S. Curtis, who photographed American Indians in the 1800s. I was also inspired by my mother’s 1970 and 1980 collections of National Geographic Magazines and also just nature and the outdoors. For a while there, I thought I would go to school for art. But all of my art was inspired by that deeper level of nature and American Indian culture. Obviously, that for me won over and has permeated throughout my life.
I’ve been with kids in school who probably to this day still don’t know what their passion is. That’s why I said I feel like I’m one of the blessed and kind of fortunate ones to know that this was always my calling. From 2007 to 2012 or so, when sustainability was becoming popular, I told my agency, “You know what? What’s different about me and these other folks who are out there, who are doing it just because it’s cool at the moment,” I said, “I’m going to be the person who’s doing it until the day I die, when it’s not in vogue any longer, literally and physically.”
I think that a lot of people have their “aha” moments. But for me, I feel like I was born saying aha.
Q: So cool. My last question, and you touched on this earlier, but given the journey you’ve been on in your career, I wonder if you have further thoughts on that vision of yourself in the future — who you want to be and what impact you hope to have?
If you had asked me 10 years ago what I would be doing at this moment, it wouldn’t be what I’m doing right now. I think that’s the beauty of not having a plan but having a path. I don’t have a plan. I have a path, and I usually go from project to project. A project could mean six days. It could mean six months. It could be a six-year project. It could be a 60-year project. That’s how I feel comfortable. I don’t look at it like a career. I look at projects that in total sum are a career.
I guess I haven’t really thought through much of what the legacy would be, but I would hope it’s that I left the world a better place, for how trite that is. And usually that means influencing other people to kind of carry on your beliefs and take them beyond what you had ever imagined them to be.
A special thank you to Hannah Phang for asking these great questions. Best of luck on your new adventure in London at Futerra!
This interview is featured in Issue №2 of The Regeneration Magazine. You can preview it, order it, or subscribe on our website.
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