Justus had once read about plant terrariums, and four years ago he made his own first habitats. They gained a lot of interest and response, so the idea soon turned into a daily activity. Their product is plant terrariums of different sizes – the plants are planted in a special soil mixture and are located in a glass container, they do not need to be watered, because they “produce” the necessary moisture by themselves as a result of photosynthesis.
BUSINESS CARD
SIA “Biotopes”, “Dzīvotne”, production and retail of interior design objects.
Year of establishment: 2020.
Employees: 3-4 people are permanently employed in the company, but seasonally up to 20-25 employees in Latvia and approximately 25 additional people in Estonia and Lithuania.
Turnover in 2022: EUR 95,155 in the Latvian market, EUR 58,374 in export markets.
Export markets: Baltic States.
Questions and answers:
Where do you see yourself in 3-5 years? We see ourselves as a stable part of this biotechnology design niche with several recognizable products both in Europe and in the wider market.
What are the challenges? Pronounced seasonality of the product – financial flow, employees, production, storage, difficult logistics due to the peculiarities of the product, which limits the possibilities of trading on the Internet both locally and globally. Balancing family and work life.
What support tools are used? LIAA business incubator, Innovation Academy, Digitization program.
“There was such a general decline, and then at some point I said to the League – that’s it, we can’t live like this anymore!” Justus tells about the beginning of the company. Līga remembers that they offered the first habitats to customers before the national holiday at the “Centrs” gallery market.
“People came all day, we had dry mouths. We saw each other at six in the evening – we had practically sold everything. We had a month to prepare the next products until Christmas.” Today, the company is already represented in all Baltic countries, employing around 40 employees in the most active month of production.
Almost 10,000 plant terrariums have been created in four years, and this is the largest producer of such products in the Baltics.
The company of Līga and Justa benefited from timely business expansion and export to Estonia already in the second year of operation, which made it possible to compensate for the strict trade restrictions in Latvia in the difficult conditions of the Covid-19 era. At the moment, Līga and Just are thinking about expanding trade also towards the Nordic countries.
The example of “Dživotne” shows that persistence and curiosity are more important than education for starting and developing your business. Līga and Just have not studied biology at an academic level, but thanks to their passion for their business idea, they have gotten to know it at a practical level. “Knowledge is so easily available, the main thing is to be interested,” emphasizes Just. Before “Dzīvotne”, both entrepreneurs were employees, so they know well how important it is to build lasting working relationships with employees.
“Having your own company means a lot of freedom, but with it comes a lot of responsibility. Also unpredictability,” says Līga about building and developing his business.
She emphasizes that it is important for an entrepreneur to be able to delegate part of the work to others in order to allocate time for the creation of new ideas and products that could balance the seasonality of the existing product. Habitats are a distinctly seasonal product, their sale mainly takes place at the end of the year, as the green, life-affirming plant terrarium has become a popular gift. One of the solutions, how entrepreneurs try to balance seasonality, is various trainings and master classes, which are also currently taking place at the “Dzīvotne” plant terrarium “factory” in Riga.
Sometimes friends start a business together, other times colleagues or family members, as in the case of Liga and Justa. The best combination of cooperation, which contributes to the development of a new company, is when one of the business partners is familiar with production processes, and the other is oriented towards sales. Later, when the new company can afford to hire employees, the question will be relevant – how to properly build relationships with employees? “When we hire someone, we always say that we are not more important, we simply have more responsibility. That’s why we sometimes have to be stricter,” says Līga about relations with employees.
What do the creators of “Dzīvotne” recommend to people who are thinking about the possibility of developing their own business? The first and main recommendation is to move from thinking to doing.
“It’s like standing by the lake for an hour and wondering if the water is warm or not. Do you want to swim or not? But everything starts to happen when you get in the water. Then you have to swim,” says Just.
According to him, anyone can try to become an entrepreneur, but in order for the business to be sustainable, everyone must find the right business direction for themselves.
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