The Gardening Company Insurance Will Pay For

Donna Letier grew up in Alaska, where she skied to school and skated at recess, and built a 30-year career in retail marketing. She started at Neiman Marcus under Stanley Marcus, whom she credits with inventing experiential retail and teaching her that customers will not buy something on every visit but will always leave feeling a certain way. She went on to work in marketing at Borders, MGM and Barneys New York. Letier came to gardening as a data problem rather than a hobby: she is not a master gardener, and she and her co-founder, Julie Eggers, saw a category with strong demand and a broken adoption curve, where 90 percent of first-time gardeners fail. They built Gardenuity as a wellness platform first, with gardening as the product. The company matches plants to each customer's zip code and season through its Gardenuity Match technology, ships fully rooted plants from about 90 growers, designs its own planters and soil, and texts customers through its GrowPro service when weather threatens a garden. Its mission is to make gardening accessible to everyone, whether they live in a high-rise, on a fire escape or in a wheelchair, and it runs programs with veterans and people who are visually impaired. Cigna approached the company before the pandemic about a gardening program for loneliness and anxiety in the workplace; when COVID cancelled every booked session, Gardenuity moved the workshops onto Zoom, and corporate wellness became its larger business, with insurance brokers now introducing it to their clients. Gardenuity has worked with more than 500 organizations, holds an 85 percent corporate repeat rate, partners with Scotts Miracle-Gro and Bonnie Plants, has been named to the Inc. 5000 two years in a row, and in January 2026 closed out Nasdaq's Wellness Week by ringing the closing bell with its entire team.