Meet the Maker Interview: Dennis Zhu, Founder of Living Glass

Meet Dennis, the founder of Living Glass – self-sustaining exotic house plants you can grow on your desk!

Can you tell us a little bit about your business, Living Glass, and how you got started? 

At Living Glass, we're trying to make exotic plants available for people to grow around their homes. Today, most houseplants have a very routine to follow to grow indoors successfully. They have to be fairly drought tolerant, be tolerant of low light, and relatively fast-growing. Because of that, it restricts many exotic and rare plants from being feasible as houseplants. 

Living Glass creates micro-environments that allow anyone to grow practically any plant they want on their desk. They're about the same care required as a plastic plant. They don't need any watering, and they can be kept in any low-light environment.

That's amazing! What was your inspiration for the business?

In high school, I was interested in growing plants. I'd say maybe that interest was more of an obsession. I also really liked rare, exotic plants. I had a whole collection of exotic plants from around the world, and I showed my friends and all of them, they thought it was cool. 

But because they weren't plant-savvy people, none of them wanted to try growing their own. I wondered how I could make it accessible to them. When I started university, I began volunteering under Dr. Max Jones and did some conservation-related projects in the Plant Science Lab. I noticed that during winter break, they had these holiday sales where they would sell little ornaments with plants inside. From there, I just refined the idea. I redesigned the product, did some things to produce and commercialize them, and then just started the company.

What's a typical day look like for Living Glass now?

A typical day would be going to the lab and doing production for our products. We have retail clients and other clients such as Chocolate Soup that packages our products in your gift boxes. We have a few students that help us out. They're usually either students who work at the lab or master's students. We make the gel for the plants in-house, and we grow all our plants in house. We assemble every product by hand, and afterward, they get moved into a massive grow chamber where we have special purple LED lights. These are programmed to shine light that's specifically geared towards growing plants. Then we leave all our products in our growth chamber, where they grow fast until they're ready for sale.

What's the biggest lesson you've learned from running your business?

Timing is critical. We have a good grasp of now when to make products and how long the products take to grow. In the early stages of the business, one of the challenges was keeping up with production times. For example, if you're selling a tech product such as a smartphone, it's ready for sale once you assemble it. It just needs to be packaged. You could build many smartphones and keep them there, and they won't deteriorate or anything.

With Living Glass, because it's a living plant, we can't simply make everything and leave it there because the plant will eventually outgrow its container. So what we've been doing now is taking orders ahead of time. We can give timelines on how long it takes to grow each plant, and we can keep inventory moving.

What does the future look like for Living Glass?

We want to essentially redefine the house plant. A lot of the plants that we currently see in the industry, they're all the same, they're relatively homogenous. What we want to do is be able to offer newer plants, rarer species, more weird and peculiar species that you can grow around your house – and we want to do it in a way that empowers individuals to grow anything without any experience.

What's your favourite plant growing right now?

We're doing sundew plants which are a type of carnivorous plant. They're cool because they have these little appendages. At the end of each appendage, they have a tiny droplet of sticky nectar. In the wild, these plants capture flies with their leaves. It's a cool plant. Moving towards the future, we want to do more types of carnivorous plants – venus flytraps, for example, are one option that we're currently working on. But we also want to do flowering plants. So like African Violets, perhaps even a rose.

What do you love most about your business?

What I like about it is that there's an educational component. When we sell our products, people are just super intrigued about how we grow them. We grow in a gel - a method that has been around for years and years, but it's not really in our education system. People don't realize that plants can be grown this way. So I love just seeing people's faces when they look at a plant and ask, "how is this thing growing in gel?" because it's a very non-conventional way.

How has partnering with Chocolate Soup helped your business?

Dan and PJ have been amazing people to work with. Chocolate Soup has been one of our biggest clients. I'm very grateful to be working with you. Because Chocolate Soup works with many other companies and it helps get our products into their hands so more people can experience them. We've been receiving a lot of great feedback from customers who've got their products through Chocolate Soup – it's a great experience!

To learn more about including Living Glass products in your next Chocolate Soup employee recognition gift box order, please contact us at [email protected].