During the now notorious summer of 2020, Bazik’s novelty caused consumers to line up on the block.
SarahCotta Plants opened in Glendale in July, an ambitious move through its married owners, Sarah and Tadeh. His store was born off a hard floor, the summer when the pandemic shut down many small businesses, but it’s still thriving two years later. Now, the state wooden counter of the store, the Baziks answer the big question: How?
Tadeh believes other people needed to escape pandemic stress.
“In retrospect, I can’t, it really happened,” he said, dressed in a black T-shirt that matched his wife. “At that time, other people were so scared. There was no vaccine, you know, the fact that other people even get here was amazing.
Sarah said attracting consumers has never been an issue. In the first few months of the store, the Baziks only let two other people in at a time and demanded masks. They left every night at 10 p. m. and when they returned in the morning, consumers were already waiting outside. Nearby Adventist Health nurses, still wearing gowns, stopped to pick plants.
Even if they had customers, the real hurdle was stocks, Sarah said. They searched for plants in San Diego, trying to buy enough guys to fill their store. The plants arrived at the distribution centers and new ones were sold on the truck. , and the Baziks would catch them or some other plant shop would. Even now, filling up inventory can be difficult, but the store is full.
Caught between a hairdresser and an air duct business, the Baziks manage to ventilate a small space. It’s full of plants, unsurprisingly, with glass bottles of cuttings on one wall and a white closet with rare plants on the other. Then Sarah and Tadeh, a living couple who paint in the middle of it all. There is only one painter who handles the counter; the Baziks manage everything else. The store closes on Mondays and Tuesdays while they buy new plants, bleach them, upload them to the formula and take pictures. On Wednesday, they replenish and reopen.
Working together means sarah and Tadeh are together “24 hours a day. “They would need it to be otherwise.
“I’ve been with him since he was 18 and I’ve never missed him,” Sarah said. “All my friends tell me all the time, ‘How do you work with your husband every day?’I’m like, ‘This is the best!’ I don’t need to work with anyone else. I can’t believe I don’t run with him.
“Imagine running with your friend,” Tadeh added.
Facebook acted as a matchmaker in 2010, when Sarah posted an article about buying a new phone and asked her friends to send her their numbers. She and Tadeh never knew each other, but he still timidly sent her his number. Messages were sent for months, even when Tadeh first visited Armenia and is still in California.
“Instead of visiting the country, I’m sitting there at 3 a. m. m. talking to her because I know she’s awake,” Tadeh said as Sarah smiled. “I fell in love with her before I even met her face to face. “
When he returned, they met in person, and years later, Tadeh proposed to Sarah’s family to make a stopover in Armenia. Although they planned to get married in late 2020, they spontaneously married on a Cancun vacation with friends in 2019, only in time for the pandemic to hit.
Both Armenians, the Bazik discovered their command of the language, i. e. practical in Glendale, which has one of the largest Armenian populations outside of Armenia. Sarah brings her fondness for plants to her grandmother’s garden in Armenia. Her grandmother guided her through the herbs and plants of hoya, highlighting each type and how it grew. While her mother had a black thumb, her grandmother can grow anything.
Tadeh tested whether he runs in the family. Seven years ago, he gave Sarah her first plant: a gleaming fig tree with violin leaves. It’s notoriously hard to keep him alive, but Sarah has turned it into something big and beautiful. Unknowingly, Tadeh had started a “healthy addiction. “Your apartment turned into a jungle, with more than a hundred floors filling each and every corner.
Sarah recruited not only Tadeh, but all her friends in her plant frenzy, hosting potting parties and handing out plant cuttings. And while her friends encouraged them to open a store, she and Tadeh insisted it was just a hobby, until the pandemic.
While COVID-19 has spurred a new era of outdoor activities, the Baziks have opted for cycling. While driving to buy Sarah a new bike, Tadeh saw an “Atrent” sign, a look-and-look effect of his eyes like a real estate agent. He went ahead and bought the bike, but nothing made them stop in the open area on the way back. The internal crisis, but the Baziks were not baffled.
“We were looking, and then I thought, how much is the rent?” said Tadeh. “And he said, and out of nowhere, I looked at Sarah and thought, ‘Do you know that you’ve about, about making a plant shop?Should we do it?”
“And then we said. . . OK! We literally signed the lease that day,” said Sarah, who is in that same area (which no longer shows any sign of disaster). the right place, as if we had planned the right place. . . “
“You’ll never get to the right time,” Tadeh concluded.
So they got to work, Tadeh turning their real estate career into a side job while working full-time at SarahCotta Plants. greater than hers. )
Your home is the store’s preparation center. In their greenhouse, they organize, classify and delete what they have bought, label the plants and take photographs for their website. Their one-year-old son, Kylo, grows up in the jungle. . When the Baziks take him to the store, he explores the terrain but spills something.
It is a non-violent little child, which the Baziks characterize by the calm of the environment. “We raised it as one of our plants,” Tadeh laughed.
And it’s not just Kylo who is learning to be a plant. Since its opening, the Baziks have made it their project to expand everyone’s green thumb. That’s why Sarah loves cuttings: even if a visitor accidentally kills a plant, a piece can be salvaged and used to grow a new one. After all, their main goal is to turn everyone into plant people, and two years after opening, they see the culmination of their efforts. Baziks love that consumers become friends and love seeing them with flowering plants they bought at the start of the store.
“I feel like the plants were just a way to escape all the madness that was going on there,” Tadeh said of the store’s startup. not about dying and not about all negative things. Once you get here, especially what’s going on there.
While some pandemic restrictions have eased, SarahCotta Plants remains a remnant of assets that emerged from turbulent times. And it persists as an escape for those who have a difficult day.
Sarah calls two “destined to be. ” The first: her marriage to Tadeh. And the second: open this plant shop.
“It’s the number of other people we’ve helped planters who have friends,” Sarah said. I won’t forget it forever.
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Jessica Benda was a lifestyle intern in the summer of 2022 and a contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She studied journalism at Cal State Fullerton, where she previously worked as editor of its student newspaper, the Daily Titan. Associated Collegiate Press, California College Media Assn. and California News Publishers Assn. She was selected as an NBCU Academy Fellow in 2021.
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