735 FX Rouxel: Founder and CEO of Gardyn

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:Today, I'm joined by FX Rexel, who is the founder and CEO of Garden, the revolutionary smart indoor gardening system that makes it possible for anyone to grow fresh, nutrient-rich produce at home year-round. And it's actually more than produce because I have some marigolds going right now on my beautiful system. So garden is spelled with a Y, by the way, in case you're Googling it right now and checking out their website. It isn't just another gadget. It's a patented hybrid ponics technology, AI powered plant care and the ability to grow over 120 varieties in just two square feet. It's changing how we think about food.

1:34Kara Goldin:So such an incredible idea, such an incredible execution. I can't wait to hear about how the idea was born and what he realized was missing in the market. And how he decided just because something's missing in the market doesn't mean you go start a company around it. So I'm very impressed by everything FX has done. So welcome, FX. Super excited to have you here. Hi, Cara. Thank you very much for having me. Super excited as well. This episode of the Cara Golden Show is brought to you by Range Rover Sport. You know that old saying, it's not what you say. it's how you say it. Well, I believe it's also how you show up because in business and in life, you have to lead with presence, power, and adaptability.

2:24Kara Goldin:That's exactly what the Range River Sport brings to the table. It's a force inside and out with a dynamic sporting personality, an assertive stance, and refined performance. This SUV doesn't just handle challenges. it owns them. Seven terrain modes let you tune the drive to whatever comes your way. The adaptive off-road cruise control and dynamic air suspension mean you're always in control. Smooth, powerful, and confident. Inside, it's next level comfort. Active noise cancellation and the cabin air purification system elevate every drive. And with a plug-in hybrid option offering up to 53 miles of electric range.

3:12Kara Goldin:It's all about performance and purpose. So if you're expecting the best, like I know you do, the Range Rover Sport is your perfect ride. Build your Range Rover Sport at rangeroversport.com slash US slash sport to configure your Range Rover Sport today. Again, that's rangerover.com slash US slash sport. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. Very, very excited. So I was not familiar with with garden and what an amazing, amazing system I have it set up actually in the corner. You'll never believe this, but my living room, and it looks absolutely beautiful. And people think that I have a green wall, which I guess I do.

4:04Kara Goldin:But it's when we hear the system every morning, it's very quiet, but you hear the dripping. People are like, what is that? And I'm like, oh, my garden is getting nourished. So I'm very, very thrilled with everything about it visually, as well as how it all works. But how would you describe garden for the first time user that is thinking about what is this system? What is this company? Yeah, that's a great question. So at the end of the day, you know, we want people to have access to healthy food. And we were thinking, hey, is it possible for everyone, everybody to have a vertical garden at home with no green farm?

4:42And the main issue most people have is, you know, everybody would love to have a garden, but you have no time, you have no space, you have no skills, no green thumb to take care of it. Everybody would love to be able to go to their own garden and harvest produce and have a super healthy dinner, obviously, but that's not the case. That's not the case because it's really hard, but life is busy. Our goal is to make this possible using technology. And we were thinking, could we imagine a system that would be super compact, that you could have in every home, that would be fully autonomous, that you don't need to take care of.

5:17You don't need to have skills or green thumb to take care of. That would just grow everything you want to grow at home. And that's what we did with Garden. To your point, most people have it in their living room. It's a beautiful object. It's just two square feet. And on these two square feet, you can grow enough food to feed a family of four people with a big salad every day. So that's the total revolution.

5:41Kara Goldin:So when I originally set it up in the living room, I was my husband was actually setting it up. And I said, just so you know, don't set it up so that it's going to be permanent because I don't know how it's going to look. And let's just put it over here for now and see what happens. And it's I mean, it's now a part of the living room. So it's it's really terrific. correct and you know to your point what we see is most people buy it because they're like i want healthy food this is super important for me for my family i want also something that is sustainable that is that has no impact on the planet there is zero pesticides it's using 95 percent less water so that's a perfect solution for yourself but also for the for the planet what we're seeing after a few months is people just also love it for the look of it because it's beautiful because its plants because it's it's mindful we have a lot of people telling us you know what it's in my living room when friends come that's the main you know topic we're talking about and i just love it i love i look i love sorry the look of it the plants are like smiling to me um we have people doing meditation in front of it every morning and that's something we we you know i'm super proud of is we're seeing we're really helping people having a healthier lifestyle when we see when we we say a healthier lifestyle.

6:59It's about food for sure, but it goes way beyond. It's about mental health. I think we live in a world where it's crazy busy, it's stressful, things are moving super fast. At some point, you want your home to be this nest where you feel comfortable, where you feel mindful, where you can recharge. And I think that's also what Garden is bringing to people.

7:20Kara Goldin:Definitely. So I read you're an Iron Man. I love doing long distance, you know, swimming, cycling, running. And when I started doing this a long time ago, I realized that nutrition is paramount. And that's how I realized that actually what we're eating every day is just, sorry for the term, crap. And even if you try to go to a great grocery store, buy, you know, produce that are pretty expensive. At the end of the day, most produce in this country is produced and harvested many weeks, sometimes months prior to reaching the shelf. So that means at the end of the day, you buy something that looks great, but there is nothing left inside.

8:00There is no nutrient. There is no vitamin left. And that's something I realized doing this long distance sport. You really realize that actually you are what you eat and you really want to pay attention to your nutrition.

8:13Kara Goldin:Definitely. So you come from a background in technology and clean energy. How did that expertise help you to not only design, but actually have garden the actual product made? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that you realize that, you know, someone said you can connect the dots only backwards. And I think that's true. when i started my career i was really interested in technology in also helping the planet and being trying to protect what we have for the future generations so i work in these fields and it's really only later on that i realized that this very strong interest in technology and protecting the planet and then nutrition through sport was you know leading me to trying to invent something like garden so that that's where it's coming from it's really a mix of How can we have our own food with zero pesticide, no GMO, you know, no impact on the planet, have a healthy diet, and at the same time doing it in a way that is good for the planet?

9:17And that's where GARDEN comes from.

9:20Kara Goldin:So how long did it take you from the concept that I'm going to go and start GARDEN to actually having a product that may be a prototype and then a product that you could actually sell? Yeah, to your point, it's entrepreneurship. You know, it's always ups and downs. It's really hard. I started with this idea in 2018, looking at, so I was working in AI at that time. At that time, AI was not that well known. It was not the buzzword that it is today. But it was really clear that AI could really change the world and bring a lot of value. So I was thinking, could we use AI to do something good for this world?

10:02And, you know, I was really focused on nutrition, really focused on growing my own food. My question to myself was, can I use AI to grow food? And that's how I started. I started in my garage, you know, the very usual way, trying to build prototypes. I bought 3D printers. I put 3D printers on my kitchen top. I enrolled my wife and my two boys to actually do shifts around the 3D printers to try to start, you know, prototyping some parts and build the first systems. And guess what? It fell miserably. The first systems I built were so bad and it wasn't working and it was breaking. And that was a nightmare.

10:43And it took me months and months of iterating and trying new things and so on to annually come up with something that I was like, hmm, now it seems that it's working. It was pretty clumsy and not great, but it was kind of doing the job. And I was like, hey, I have something. I'm going to now go to the market and have this big company and so on. And my wife told me, no way. She told me, you know, FX, be serious. You know, we have a mortgage. We have kids. We're going to go to college. You're going to just drop everything for this dream of yours. That's not serious. And she was right. And she was right.

11:18And I said, okay, you know, that makes sense. And so what do you think I should do? And she told me, you know, I think you should test it. You cannot just go like this with just because you are excited. You need to make sure, you know, we call it product market fit. You need to make sure that other people feel like you and like it. I said, okay, but how can I do that? And she suggested, you know, you have these 3D printers. Maybe instead of using them for prototyping, use them to build a few systems and give them to France. And that's what we did. So I built in the range of 15 to 20 different prototypes of garden at that time.

11:56Pretty, again, pretty ugly, but, you know, functional. And I gave them to France. And I told her, you know, I'm going to ask them what they think about it. And she said, no, no, no, you won't. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it because I really want a fair and non-biased view of this. And again, she was right. Because, you know, when you start something, when you create something, it's like, you know, a parent looking at their baby. It's always the most beautiful baby. And the reality may be very different. So she was right. We gave this to friends. We gave them a few months to, you know, play with this and experience it.

12:34And then she went through every of them to ask. She's very organized. She had this long list of questions and questions and form and survey. And then she came back to me and said, okay, FX, you know, I went through everybody. And here are the results. And I was like, okay, well, what are they thinking? You know, is it okay? Are they excited? Are they disappointed? Does it make sense? And she said, you know what? The main feedback is there is still a lot of work. There is a lot of things to improve. it's far from perfect. There are a lot of things that are not great that needs to be fixed. But overall, they love the experience.

13:15They love the ability to be able to grow their own food. It is super delicious. It's super tasty. There are a lot of things that needs to be improved, but there is something there. I think FX, you should go and start this company. And that's how it went. And that's how I formally incorporated the company and started Guarded.

13:35Kara Goldin:Yeah, so the first one from the time you were tinkering in your garage and putting something together to actually selling it, it often takes a lot longer than you ever think to actually get to a prototype. So what was that? Like, how long did it take? it took us basically uh almost two years to get to something that we could start selling um because at the end of it to your point first there is the idea and then you're like okay how do i move from an idea to something that is real concrete that is that is kind of working so that's the prototyping phase but then these things need to be manufactured so it needs to be um designed and or redesigned so that it can be manufactured and you need to find partners you need to do all this design so that's what we did basically so most of the rnd i did in 2018 um moving into 2019 i started working on a real design that can be manufactured tried to find partners um i found a great partner at that time in in china um to uh to manufacture this i went to this place many times and then you know it's it's always um the chance um i remember i was uh finalizing the manufacturing of the first batch of garden.

14:53So I was in the factory with this partner to make sure it was manufactured the right way with the right level of quality and so on. That was in January 2020. I was in China in January 2020 in this factory trying to make sure that all the gardens would be manufactured the right way. That was the first container, the first batch. And then when I left, that was end of January, I left China and I took a few gardens with me. I put the container on the sea, went back to the U.S., and then met a few friends. And they told me, what are you saying? You were in China? Have you heard about this thing? There is kind of a virus over there, like Corona something.

15:32And I was like, no, I have no clue. You know, they were not talking about any virus in China for people being in China. And I was not in Wuhan. I was in the South of China. But still, everybody was scared. Like, hey, FX, are you bringing this virus back? I was not, obviously. But the thing that is crazy, if you think about it, is I left China, I came back to the U.S. January 2020. A few days after I left China, China just went into lockdown. And then the containers arrived in the U.S. early March 2020. Lockdown in the U.S. was March 12th, 13th, something like that. So these containers had arrived, you know, just a few days later.

16:16There would be no garden. There would be no discussion today together. So that's really, I don't know what it is being an entrepreneur is, you know, you need to move fast because you don't know what's going to happen. But you also need to be lucky. And that's what happened with us.

16:31Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. So how many, what was like the first order that actually arrived? How big was it? And how scary was that too? I mean, obviously, nobody had really, I mean, there wasn't much of a comparison to what occurred during that time in 2020, especially for a brand new founder. So, like, what, I mean, what was at risk at that point? Yeah, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you believe in what you're doing. So, you're placing orders. That means you're spending your own money to try to get this thing manufactured, hoping that you're going to be able to sell it. So you always start with a small batch.

17:10But, you know, to your point, what we look now, looking back as a small batch at that time was a lot. You know, I think the container was like 300 gardens. That's what we had to start with. So pretty limited number, small number. But back then, you know, when you're just a small team and that's a lot. And you're like, hey, are we going to find a way to sell these 300 gardens? And that was a big question mark. Guess what? But fast forward, we sold north of 100 ,000 of them so far. So that's, you know, you see the scale and how fast things can change. But to your point, when you start, 300 is a big figure.

17:48A few years later, that's a small thing that makes you smile.

17:51Kara Goldin:So you have a registered trademark, Hybriponics. Can you talk about the difference between that and maybe Hydroponics, which I think many people have heard about? Yeah, absolutely. So hydroponics is this very common technology whereby you grow plants using water. And that means there is no soil and the plants are getting their nutrients from the water. The nutrients are dissolved in the water. There are many different types of hydroponics. When I started working on garden, I was really wondering how we can make sure we can grow enough food for people. And if you think about it, most people have a house or an apartment.

18:31It's not that much space. So you need to have something that is very compact. So that means we had to really imagine a new system, a new technology that would allow to grow a lot of food in a very compact space. And to get there, we totally reimagined this hydroponic technology. It had to be vertical. It had to be with a very high density of plants. It had also to make sure that the plants were getting the best conditions in terms of nutrients and watering and light and everything. and by working on this, we ended up with this totally new technology that we ended up patent. And we have like 25 or 30 patents on this and it's called Hybripronics.

19:09This technology is, what is amazing with this technology is that's the highest density of food that exists today. That means in just two square feet in your apartment, in your house, you can grow enough food for a family of four and that's the game changer.

19:23Kara Goldin:So when I say the name Kelby, what comes to mind? Yeah, it can be our AI. The beauty of this system is it's driven by AI. AI is really a buzzword now. So you're going to tell me, hey, what is it that it's doing? Actually, what the system does, there are a lot of sensors, temperature, humidity. The system is looking at your plants to understand what are the plants that are there, how fast they are growing, and so on. And then optimizing the growth of your plants and also letting you know if you need to do anything about your plants. and we gave a name to this to the CI we call it Kelby. Kelby actually is a Gaelic name it's pretty ancient name that can be male or female and it it means fountain of life and we were finding that you know fountain of life for something that is about water and that is about creating life and bringing life to this world was really a great name so Kelby is the name of the CI and what Kelby does, it's going to be looking at your plants 24 by 7, optimizing their growth, and then letting you know step by step if there is anything that you need to know or do about your plants.

20:31And that way, most people that have a garden have absolutely no green thumb. They have no clue. They just, they are busy people. They just want to enjoy amazing plants. And Kelby takes care of this for

20:43Kara Goldin:so when we uh first received our our garden uh it was you know we got a a variety of as i mentioned it wasn't just produce but it was also some flowers as well which are quite beautiful uh it took probably to sprout it took a couple of weeks now we have a very full um experience a couple of months in. It's really, really incredible and tasty, I should also mention too, and so easy, as well as to your point. I was really concerned that there might be, it might attract bugs and we have a lot of insects outside, but nothing. I mean, it is just, it's absolutely terrific. So when you think about maybe the moment since launching where you started to hear consumer stories and you said, okay, this is working.

21:46Kara Goldin:Like, we've got a company here. We're doing something right. Do you remember any of those stories that kind of helped you to keep going, especially when things get a little challenging? You know, those are the love stories that help. yeah there are a ton of stories and i think that's the beauty of the life of an entrepreneur you have a lot of stories positive and negative that you need to um to uh you know live with one thing that i really vividly remember is this email i got from a very early customer um when people get the device they get an email from me saying hey we're super super proud that you're part of this garden community if you need anything let me know and i sign and i give my email so people can reach out obviously we have a customer service that is helping everyone but if people are like hey i want to talk to the ceo because there is something i don't like or something i want different i'm super happy to uh to hear from people so this guy sent me this uh email back and um the email was really um weird and i said that's why i still remember it vividly it was starting like i hate you that was the beginning of email i hate you i was like wow that's gonna be a hard email you know and you're receiving a lot of emails so some emails are positive some are pretty negative and you just need to deal with it that's that's the the job of uh you know managing your company so the the email started with i hate you um you know i hate you um i spent so much time looking at your website and trying to understand what this system was about and whether it would work for me and what is it that i could grow on this and whether it would be hard or not whether that be a lot of work and so on and i ended up you know buying your your your stuff your garden and i i hate you because i love it it was so hard for me to make a decision and and your website sucks because your product is so great you should have a much better website to explain how beautiful how amazing how easy it is and you know so i still that was several years ago i still remember this email because i was like wow that's gonna be a hard one and the guy was right i mean i think i think we have a product that is really amazing that people love uh at that time our website was really bad and we it was really hard and i think it's really hard also you know when you do something new that doesn't exist to explain what it is about and that's kind of what you said also cara you say hey you know i got this stuff i was not sure I tried it, and now I love it.

24:13And that's the case for most of the new stuff. And I would say the main challenge we have as a new company, developing a new product. I mean, we've been now in this field for many, many years, but it's really for people who come up, who are in touch with us for the first time, like, what is this? Does it make sense? Is it going to really produce a lot? Yes, it will. Is it really easy? Because they're saying it's easy. Is it really true? Actually, it is true. But, you know, it's really about trying to make sure people understand what it is about so that they can really at some point adopt this new system.

24:48And what we're seeing is when people adopt it, they just love it. So that was really the memory, I would say, that this email I got.

24:57Kara Goldin:I love it. So when you receive the garden and all of the different, the produce and the flowers, the seeds, then you also subscribe. And so can you talk about what that subscription does for people? Is it part of what they need to do? Or is it something that somebody doesn't have to do in order to have success with the garden system? That's a great question. this subscription is absolutely optional you absolutely don't need to to take it so when you when you buy your garden system um it comes to your place within a few days um our warehouses in you know we have three warehouses on the west coast texas and east coast so basically within two days you're gonna get your your garden it comes with everything to get uh growing so you you get obviously your device we have two models we have a small one that is called garden studio perfect for typically two people in an apartment.

25:56We have garden home that is the big system, bigger system, two square feet, still pretty compact, perfect for a house and a family. And it comes with everything. It comes with the plant food. It comes with all the plants that you can start growing. These plants come as a, we call it a white cube. So it's a cube like this. And you just put it in the pot and then you put it in the columns and it starts growing. So you get everything to get growing. in addition, you can also take this membership if you want to. If you don't take this membership, anyway, you can use the Guardian app. You can manage your Guardian the way you want.

26:33You can order all the plants you want from the Guardian app. Very early on, people told us, you know what, I want something simple. I want something that is kind of all-you-can-grow system. Can you do something like kind of a bundle? And that's how we came up with this membership. In this membership, you have two things. you have all the plants you want so typically if you have a garden home we give you credits for 10 plants every month you can order whatever you want free shipping and so on so it's really all you can grow and with this membership can also be in the ability to have someone that is looking at your garden 24 by 7 and hand holding you step by step and the reality is most people so you're really free to take this membership or not but it's a brick it's really a big bargain you're getting all these plants for free, you're getting 60 % on any additional plants you want.