Yahoo Finance This entrepreneur raked up and sold 1,800 maple leaves last year
Last year Kyle Waring, a 28-year-old entrepreneur based in Boston, decided to start a business that sounds like a joke: selling leaves online during the fall foliage season. But in its first year, the extremely seasonable company, called ShipFoliage.com managed to sell 1,800 leaves—600 packs of three for $19.99—much cheaper than a plane ticket to New England. Nostalgia is no joke.
“People have an emotional connection with the fall, cold breezes, apple pie, pumpkin spice,” Waring says.
For the past two seasons, Waring and his wife Jessica have scoured the ground of New England picking up colorful leaves. “We collect in different states depending on the time of the season,” he says. “Most of our current leaves are from Vermont.”
After they harvest a fallen crop, the Warings sort the leaves and grade them based on the beauty of the yellow anthophylls, orange carotenoids, and red anthocyanins that the green chlorophyll usually masks. Only the top grade makes the cut for the preservation process.
Thanks to the strong public response to the debut offering, the Warings have upped their game, getting a botanist to design new resin-based preservation techniques and offering packages that include necklaces, coasters, gift boxes as well as three- and five-leaf bundles. It’s a far cry from Waring’s first seasonal shipping business, “Ship Snow Yo,” which he said he founded “during the depths of the Boston blizzards of 2015.”
Fundamentally, of course, the entire phenomenon is a joke, since a handful of snow or trio of leaves really cannot reproduce the autumnal majesty of the Northeast. But with more and more people relocating far from home in search of better jobs or lives, maple leaf–size holes can open up in their lives.
“Lots of customers are gifting the leaves to their friends and family who live in the South, where the leaves don’t change colors,” says Waring, who makes a point to say they ship anywhere in the world. “Changing leaves brings back these vivid and emotional memories.”
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumerism, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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