Acquiring and Expanding the Seed Tray Business

Kevin Espiritu shares the story of how he acquired a seed tray company, which started as a partnership and grew into a significant product line for Epic Gardening.

"A friend of mine who's in the gardening space hit me up and said, 'Hey, can I come down to the house and show you this new tray that I made to start seeds in?' This was early 2021.

He comes down and shows me this tray. It's a very sturdy, durable tray to start seeds in, which solves some of the problems of them being flimsy. The second I hold it, I'm like, 'Holy shit, this is the best seed starting tray I've ever seen in my life.'

He says, 'You can stand on it if you want to.' I'm 220 pounds, so I stand on it with one foot and it doesn't budge. I ask him what he wants to do, and we decide to split the profits 50/50 - he has the product, I have the audience.

I started teasing it in Instagram or YouTube videos. We built up maybe a week or two of inventory, then I put out an Instagram reel saying, 'This is the coolest tray I've ever seen.' We sold out our couple weeks of inventory in like 25 seconds.

Over the next 3-4 weeks, we just built up inventory, dropped it, sold it out, built up inventory, dropped it, sold it out. Then I went to him and said, 'Look, not only is this working really well, but there's definitely more trays we could make. What if you just joined Epic?'

We structured a deal where we paid him for all the assets, the molds, the research and development time, gave him some equity, and hired him as our product lead. We've built that line out to like 12 or 15 SKUs going D2C and wholesale now. I think we're up 7x probably on the acquisition price as far as revenue after the fact."