Thanks in large part to social media, the market for indoor succulents is larger, more varied and more popular than ever before

Ann Patterson, houseplant buyer at Portland Nursery, said she has been collecting succulents for a long time. She called them lovely, intriguing little plants.

“They’re interesting looking with lots of different textures,” Patterson said. “You can fit a lot of them into a small space and they’re slow-growing, so they don’t take over the house.”

While tropical foliage is the largest part of the houseplants market, Patterson considers succulents as an important part, too. She estimates they account for about 10–15% of her nursery’s houseplant sales.
Succulents appeal to many different customers, according to Patterson. She added that Portland Nursery gets orders for two-inch succulents to be used as giveaways at weddings.

“They’re the potato chips of houseplants — you can’t just buy one,” she said.

Patterson believes the availability of different varieties has grown over time.“Even when I started working here eight years ago, the variety was smaller,” Patterson said. “Now, it’s not that difficult to find something I’ve never seen before, which always keeps it interesting.”

More varieties

Chelsey Greene, general manager of wholesale grower Cascade Tropicals in Snohomish, Washington, reports that this year her business has been selling a similar amount of succulents as in the past, but a larger variety of different ones.

“More varieties pop up more frequently,” Greene said, adding that variegated plants are very popular. “Now, there are variegated varieties like string of hearts, string of pearls, and even aeonium with white variegation.”

In addition to ordering succulents from California and Florida, Cascade Tropicals has a sister company with a grow site in Redmond, Washington. About two to three months after the grow site receives the cuttings, the succulents are big enough to sell to retailers through Cascade Tropicals.

Greene said retailers are always looking for “bread-and-butter” items that consistently sell well, along with new plants to add to their inventory. She closely watches sales trends for new items and adjusts accordingly.

“Later, we see if that’s really going to stick around or if it was just the newness that brought a spike in sales,” Greene said. “We have to keep a close eye on what the market is doing and act as quickly as we can.”

In addition to consistent best-sellers like string of hearts, jade, aloe and agave, Patterson is always looking for different and unusual items. One such variety is the San Pedro cactus or the particularly small succulents, Aloinopsis and Titanopsis.

“There are some great growers around where we get the plants from,” Patterson said.

Keeping track of trends

Becky Sell, owner of Sedum Chicks in Turner, Oregon, has been working with succulents since 1999, when she was about to get married. Her mother, who had a collection of succulents to go with her job as a merchandiser for Black Gold fertilizer, came up with the idea to sell cuttings at the 2000 Clackamas County Spring Garden Fair to make money for the wedding.

“That’s how it all started,” Sell said.

From there, her mother’s greenhouse collection grew as the hobby transformed into a business. “It was fun to do it with my mom and my grandma loved doing it, too, so she’d help,” she said.

Succulents weren’t as hot back in 2000, but Sell has seen their popularity grow over time with the help of Pinterest and social media posts promoting the beauty and ease of maintaining the plants.

“Social media outlets show how amazing these plants are,” she said. “I get a lot of questions like, ‘Do you have this plant I saw on Pinterest or Facebook?’” The media outlets spark people’s interest in the variety of succulents and show them how to use them outside in a rock garden or an indoor display.

Nicole Forbes, education and events director at Dennis’ 7 Dees, teaches customers about all sorts of garden-related topics. She said she really saw a shift toward succulents about a decade ago when they became a hit on social media. Around that time, she noticed the trend in her own family, when her niece and nephew announced they were into the aesthetic hardy plants. So, Forbes handpicked a collection of two-inch succulents and shipped them to her sister’s house, where her niece lined her bedroom window with them.

“When I was a kid, I had pet rocks and sea monkeys, those things that started to turn me into a naturalist and appreciate the outdoors,” Forbes said, adding that succulents can play a similar role for kids now.
Forbes has noticed that new waves of interest in plants can sneak up on retailers unless they stay up on social media trends.

“But once we identify a trend, our role is to step in and educate and connect the people who see it on social media and want to learn how to grow it,” she added.

Forbes recommended being skeptical of social media, however.

“You never see failures, just touched up, cropped photos, so people have no sense of what a succulent looks like as it grows,” she said. “They fall in love with them when they’re small and I get questions from customers, like, ‘Why does it look like this?’ with a picture of something that has grown. It’s almost like they fell in love with them as a statue.”

New varieties prove popular

Sell believes the succulents industry is very strong right now.

The “string of” succulents that look exactly like their name implies — string of pearls, string of dolphins, string of bananas, and more — are especially popular.

Patterson notes there’s even a string of watermelon.

“If someone finds a way to name a plant ‘string of’ something, it will be popular,” Patterson said.

“I just saw a ‘string of footballs,’ which I’ve never heard of before,” Forbes said, adding that people love collecting the “string of” varieties but struggle with them. She said these fussy plants don’t like to get their foliage wet but are often put in hanging planters. She suggests planting them in a way that allows a person to set them in a tray to be watered from the bottom.

Hanging succulents, in general, are popular, as are those with different colors, like the pink and red hues of Echeveria and Crassula jade plants.

Clark Weber worked from the ground up in the nursery industry, starting with digging water line ditches and eventually taking his career into the office of Little Prince of Oregon Nursery in Aurora, Oregon.

“Over time, my interest in the indoor succulent varieties ballooned and I became more and more familiar with what was unique and different, paying attention to sales trends, and well, simply what I was seeing around in independent garden centers and big box stores,” Weber said.

He was ecstatic to start overseeing succulent cuttings because he loves scouring availability lists for the coolest, rarest varieties, as well as popular, strong growers.

On his list are Adromischus, Aeonium, Anacampseros, cotyledon, Crassula, Delosperma, Echeveria, Gasteria, Graptopetalum, Haworthia, Kalanchoe, Pachyphytum, Sedum and more.

“Succulents display numerous characteristics that make them unique, including color, texture, growth pattern and, of course, blooms,” Weber said. “Personally, I have a fascination with Crassula, which displays highly geometric, fractal designs.”

One new variety for Little Prince this year is the Anacampseros telephiastrum ‘Variegata’.

“Its apple green rosettes have adorably pointed, tightly packed leaves in clumps with pink margins,” Weber said. “The color is especially pronounced when the plant is happily stressed by its environment, given full sun exposure and drought conditions.”

Weber thinks the future looks bright for houseplant sales in general, especially indoor succulents.
“They have really caught on with younger generations,” Weber said. He thinks this is because they require low maintenance and little space, and they come with the instant gratification of owning a healthy plant.

Outdoor, indoor, online and in-person

Sedum Chicks offers hardy succulents that do well outdoors in the Pacific Northwest year round when placed in areas with good drainage or dry places like between the sidewalk and the street.

Sell said the climate here works well for succulents.

“In Oregon, we don’t have too high of highs or low of lows, so we are able to have so many types of plants and succulents,” she said.

The business also has a collection of tender succulents that can grow outdoors in containers during the summer and need to be brought inside in the fall.

“Those are popular and the amount of colors is spectacular,” Sell said. “I have quite a few in my own house — it’s like bringing the outdoors inside.”

Sell took Sedum Chicks from hobby to full-time business in 2007, and she also expanded the number of shows and markets she attended as a vendor. Sedum Chicks succulents were available online for about five years, but due to challenges with shipping and lack of staff, Sell decided to phase that out and focus on in-person events.

The plants bring people together, not only at the event itself but also afterward as well. Oftentimes, someone will get a particular succulent and swap cuttings with a friend who purchased a different variety.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when all in-person events were canceled, Sell had to pivot and began working full time outside of the nursery.

“Now, we are kind of back to where we had started but as a part-time hobby,” Sell said.

She said she’s glad she’s able to keep Sedum Chicks going now that events and markets have returned.

“We enjoy it and we have a great collection and a following of people,” Sell said.

Emily Lindblom is an Oregon-based freelance journalist covering business, environmental and agricultural news. She has a background in community reporting and a master’s degree in multimedia journalism. Visit her website at emilylindblom.com or reach her at [email protected].

From the January 2023 issue of Digger magazine | Download PDF