Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Green House Coffee + Plants

Our second stop on the Main Street Mavericks in Corvallis led us to Greenhouse Coffee & Plants, a vegan coffee shop that also sells an amazing amount of greenery.

The store’s aesthetic is overpowered with cuteness and kitsch; there’s something for everyone — especially if they need to go to the bathroom. One Google review says, “Make sure you visit the bathroom before you leave.” And we concur: Every vegan coffee shop needs a wrestling and jungle-themed restroom to empower and uplift you.

Owner Bryon Neal Daniels talks to Main Street Mavericks about his small business journey.

Q&A With Greenhouse Coffee & Plants

Tell us about yourself and your small business

My name is Bryon Neal Daniels. I’m the owner of Greenhouse Coffee and Plants here in Corvallis, Oregon.

It’s a full-service coffee bar and a retail house plant store. So we sell a range of house plants as well as coffees, lattes, mochas, and some local art, like little pots and knickknacks and drinking.

My background is in business. I’ve been self-employed my entire life. Before this, I was in marketing, photo, video, and social media content. I ran a lot of Instagram accounts and stuff for other businesses. I eventually got to a point where I was a little burned out on doing that for other people.

I just loved the idea of having a brick-and-mortar place where people would come to me like I could just have the doors open and customers would come in, and I no longer had to go chase clients and invoices and contracts. The goal was honestly that this would be a short-term thing for me, and I would hang out, work here for a few months, and then pass it off, have someone to manage it, and take it over.

But within a couple of months of being a barista, I was like, this is the coolest, easiest thing I’ve ever done. And I should have done it a long time ago. Just like the most fun I’ve ever had doing a job. And I’ve had a lot of very cool jobs. So, I essentially transitioned out of marketing, and I’m now a retired photographer. And I do this full-time now, and I’ve been working on expansions and growing the business.

It started from a pretty small concept of a quick limited coffee menu and houseplants and has evolved into just what it is now. An ever-changing offering of a bunch of different things.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

For me, like I do, I enjoy the independence of owning your own business. And there’s a certain amount of pride that comes with having a place that you’re proud of and that you love going into and showing off to people.

But I think relationships are the coolest thing. Like, I love the people that come in daily, and we get regulars, and especially being in a college town, our clientele shifts, and we get a lot of new people coming in. We get their parents coming in, family from out of town. And it’s just cool.

Having people come in and ask what they’re up to today, where they’re from, what they’re doing in town, and getting to share a little bit about Corvallis with them. We are everyone’s first stop.

And so it’s cool that we get to curate their trip through town and be like, you’ve got to go to talk of, and you’ve got to check out Brass Monkey and Core Zone and tell them all the places that we love about this town.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

That’s a tricky one. Like I want to say, the answer is just to do it, put yourself out there, and try and go for it because, a lot of the time, the biggest hurdle is just trying.

And many people stop right there at the fear of trying and failing. But you will never figure out if you can, and you’ll never know if it’s a possibility until you put some things in motion. Especially today, there’s so much information available on the Internet.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from becoming a photographer, learning how to make coffee, or learning how to do pottery. There’s just endless amounts of information. Anyone can learn to do anything as long as you have the confidence to try it.

Can you tell us more about the inspiration for this place?

Greenhouse is a project of mine — where it was a partnership. Some friends of mine who are also part owners of this specialize in design and building, and all of us have a really good eye for things coming together.

And so my goal for this with my marketing background and being into like photography and video and social media was that this would be not only just say, like a great shop and a good place to get coffee and stuff, but it’s also, that Instagram spot I want people to come through and I want them to hit every single little photo stop. It’s like a scavenger hunt in here. You take your mirror selfie there, and then there’s the wallpaper. You’ve got to get that one. And then there’s the yellow chairs in front of the blue wall, and it’s a whole thing all the way through, even until you get to the bathroom, which is its own little jungle with its own song that plays on repeat.

And so it’s the special and unique thing about this, which is just like making an experience outside of it. Being a place to go and hang out and visit and show your friends. But it’s something where you can always find little new things, whether it’s like looking in the drawers and finding our little secret notebooks and the secret menu in a folder labeled secret menu.

There’s just a lot of layers to it. And that’s something that’s really unique to here.

I feel like half of our Google reviews are just about the bathroom.

What’s one challenge you are facing, and how can the community help?

I think we’re in a unique situation where we don’t face a ton of challenges. Knock on wood, it’s been easy.

The biggest hurdles I’m having right now are that we’ve got a lot of projects coming up and a lot of things that are just coming down the pipe very quickly.

This is a secret — we are expanding through the wall within the next month to two months. We have the permit for that. So we’re building out the space over there, and we’ll have some more seating and a stage, and some things like that will expand our menu offerings. That’s going to present a whole lot of learning curve and extra expenses, and it’s going to just change the flow of things, and I think that’s probably the biggest obstacle and the biggest challenge that we’re going to hit here soon, but it’s going to be a fun one.

And the thing that we need from the community is for people to just show up and be really nice to us, buy things, and be a little forgiving along the way because it’s going to take a minute to get a new flow down.

Okay, tell us, how do you stay on top of watering all the plants in the shop?

It’s definitely a group effort. My team and I, mostly my team, do all of the watering for the plants, and it is a process that took me probably six months of running the shop to figure out how to actually do it. So, we have a color-coded watering chart.

There’s a layout of the shop, and every single section is in a different color. Every color has a day that’s assigned to it. This is our Monday section, and we have to take everything over here, take it to the sink, water it, let it rinse a little bit, and take it back to where it goes.

It’s a lot of maintenance, but we get a plant order about every two or three weeks or so. And most of the plants don’t stay here too long. So, it’s not a lot of long-term care. It’s a little more rotational, but there’s some stuff that’s been here for a while and requires a little bit more maintenance.

How do you source all your other items?

So a lot of the shop’s inventory, we get those things through different wholesale sites and stuff, of course. And there are a lot of different ways we use nurseries up and down the West Coast.

Everything is local. If it’s not local to here, it’s from someone local to some other small town as a small business owner. And then we also work with a lot of artists and stuff in the community. We have a lot of our jewelry and macrame things and stuff like that from different artists who live in and around Corvallis.

What does the small business community here look like?

Yeah, this small business community is super important. You have heard the phrase, community over competition.

But you can’t have an active and busy downtown community, customer base, or shopping district without everyone being successful. Like you’re only as good as the shops around you. For me, we have a really good network of businesses here, whether it’s like Instagram group chats or even just going and supporting each other’s businesses.

Everyone’s very friendly and looking out for each other here, which is good. And it takes the community for everyone to be able to thrive and survive this. And you can definitely tell when people aren’t invested in doing the events or participating in community activities and things like that.

And they’re not seeing the success of everyone working together and trying to improve what downtown Corvallis looks like.

How has the community here shaped your small business?

I think the downtown Corvallis community has shaped Greenhouse in such a way that’s different than I expected it to be. I didn’t know who our clientele was upon opening this. It’s not who I thought it was. I also had no idea what Corvallis’s general community was like.

I’d never lived in a college town. I didn’t have a college experience. So, everything here was a little bit of a mystery to me. I also had a lot of unknowns about what the community was going to want from Greenhouse. And so a lot of that has shifted things. My initial vision of this was not a sit-down place — it was a grab-and-go, get in, get your things and get out, keep as much room for plants as possible, and have pretty limited seating.

And since then, we’ve added seating and stuff outside. The biggest request we get all the time is more seating. And so now, taking this like the next big venture to expand, we’re more than doubling our rent for every single month. But it’s just because that demand is there, and the people have been asking for it and wanting it.

And I very quickly realized that I love having customers that come in and sit the bar and hang out for hours and just chat and like it, it makes my day better. So now I’m thinking, let’s pay some more money, have extra seating, and get more people in here.

It’s a really good inclusive hangout space for people to come and feel warm, welcome, and safe, and it’s just a good spot to be in town.

What’s your favorite thing in the shop?

My favorite thing in the shop isn’t so much like it’s not a thing for sale or a thing that we offer. But one of those little layers and Easter Eggs of the shop is specifically in the bathroom here. The jungle bathroom.

There is an action figure in the wall. An action finger of Jungle Boy. He’s the son of the late Luke Perry from like 90210 and Archie Riverdale. And in this bathroom, because his name is Jungle Boy and it’s jungle theme, there’s one song that plays in there, and it’s Tarzan Boy by Baltimore.

And it’s just a nice little layer of Easter eggs because as a wrestler, that is the song that he comes out to as well. So it’s just this nice little thing that I enjoy doing.

Vendor Round-Up

And which of our vendors and partners are assisting Greenhouse on their small business journey?

What site does Greenhouse use for eCommerce? Squarespace.

What POS do you use? Square.

Who is your credit card processor? Square.

Who do you use for business banking?  KeyBank

What do you use for accounting software? Square

And what do you use for payroll? Gusto