About
Why we made Stems
We are Jamie and Juliette. Stems started at our kitchen table, with a spreadsheet that was never quite right.
About
Why we made Stems
We are Jamie and Juliette. Stems started at our kitchen table, with a weekly spreadsheet that never looked right and was out of date by the weekend. This is the why, not the how.
Jamie & Juliette · our garden and allotment in Mithian, where it began
Jamie & Juliette · our garden and allotment in Mithian, where it began
It started with a spreadsheet
I grow flowers in our garden and on our allotment in Mithian, and a couple of summers ago I started selling them on the side. Every week I sat down to write up what was ready, and every week it was the same battle: fiddling with columns to make a spreadsheet look halfway presentable, lining up prices, trying to make a list of stems feel like something you would actually want to buy from.
Then came the real chore. The dahlias would come in, the sweet peas would go over, and the list I had spent an evening on was wrong by the weekend. So I would redo it, export it, and send it round again. The flowers sold themselves. They just needed somewhere nicer to live than a spreadsheet I had to rebuild and resend every single week.
So we made the thing I wished I had
Jamie builds software, and he got tired of watching me wrestle the same spreadsheet back into shape every week. One weekend he made me a single page: everything in season, a price beside each stem, one link to share, and it looked the way I had been trying to make a spreadsheet look all along. I put it at the top of my Instagram and never made another spreadsheet.
Other growers we knew wanted one too. So we built it properly, for all of us. That is Stems, a good shopfront for the people who grow the flowers, and nothing more complicated than that.
British grown, in season
Cut this morning, a few miles from your door. Not flown halfway round the world to sit in a bucket for a week.
Where it is going
It turned out we weren’t the only ones
What began as one page for our own flowers has become something with the potential to help a lot of small growers. All over the country there are people doing exactly what we were doing: a garden, an allotment, a polytunnel, and a weekly list nobody could keep up with. Stems gives every one of them a proper shopfront, so the flowers they grow can be seen and sold without a spreadsheet or a middleman in the way.
And the more growers who can list what they have, the more British grown flowers get bought close to where they were cut. That is the part we are quietly proud of. Every bunch sold here is a bunch that did not need a plane, a cold store or a long lorry ride. Buying local, in season, from someone down the road is better for the grower, and it is a good deal kinder to the planet too.
What we believe
A few things we’re sure about
What we believe
Grown nearby
The best flowers were in a field this morning, not on a plane. They come with a name, a place, and a person, and that is the whole point.
Your buyers stay yours
We never sit between you and the sale, and we never take a cut of it. People reach you the way they always have.
No lecturing
There is a real movement of British growers doing this properly. Stems is a tool for it, not a sermon about it.
Jamie & Juliette
Got flowers to sell?
It takes an evening, and most of that is choosing photos. Claim your handle and put the link in your bio.
Or just say hello, hello@stems.market. A real person reads it, usually one of us.