Action packed years with novel innovations, design awards and wonderful customers

Our first ten years have truly been flying by and we enjoyed every minute. The biggest reason for this is you, our wonderful customers. Your enthusiasm for urban gardening is what drives us forward. We have with your help launched three generations of iconic kitchen gardens. We also developed a patented vertical garden, delivered products to presidents and won design prizes, just to mention some of the exciting things we have experienced. We are looking forward to an even more action packed ten years with you.

Like any company, the success comes out the people you gather around the idea you believe in. We have been lucky that so many talented people found our mission, to create urban gardening solutions to meaningfully reduce food waste. Without these wonderful people and their different mission critical skill sets, we would never have gotten such a rapid start.

The clock speed of Tregren was set during the first six month when we developed our first product Herbie from the idea, all the way to the shelves of our retailers. Herbie was a ground breaking product in many ways, it was the first product that could use both seed pods and pre-grown plants in pots of different sizes and shapes. This feature together with the iconic design made it a true classic of indoor gardens and we can now clearly see that its design inspired many other products that followed.

“The popularity of Herbie did take us by surprise; we didn’t expect our first product to be ground breaking. What Herbie proved, is that there is a huge number of people appreciating first class ingredients while at the same time minimizing the food waste and the ecological footprint. We really felt that we were entering a huge adventure by being able to provide a solution for this.” says Tregren’s founder Markus “MaCCa” Nilsson

It will be ten years in August when the first customers received their Herbie. Many of the first Herbies are still in use as we are contacted weekly by happy Herbie owners looking for spare parts to their beloved indoor garden. It’s no wonder that the popular Herbie has won several consumer tests in different media.

We have always invited our customers to give us feedback and when our customers expressed a wish for a smaller indoor garden the Genie project was started. It was no easy task to develop our second product, as the threshold was set high by the success of the Herbie. We decided to do something quite different as we wanted to separate the growing light from the garden itself. The reason for this is that you could bring the herbs in the garden to the dinner table and that you could use hydroponic garden outside without the growing light during the summer. The Genie- project worked extensively to find more ecological materials to manufacture the product, so we started to work with some of the leading companies in the field. The result was that the garden itself was produced in bio composites, containing 50% wooden fibers, and ceramic composites were used for cooling the LEDs. The carbon footprint of Genie was reduced over 50% due to these materials. Not only was the Genie kitchen garden unique with its material choices, the design was praised and Genie won the prestigious Good Design –award for its user-friendly appealing design. Winning the award was a proof that our efforts and investments in combining design with functionality has been the right choice.

At the same time when Genie was developed we worked on creating a software controlled garden that would ensure that anyone could be a successful gardener without previous experience. What we wanted was to create an intelligent and fully automated garden that would be its own gardener. This was something that came from the customers time after time, as most people lack time and knowledge to take care of their gardens.

We solved this by creating an app, a “remote control”, controlling the light, the watering and the nutrients so that different species of plants would always have the perfect conditions specified for them. But in 2013 the components were way too expensive and the commercial cloud service didn’t exist as they do today, so we had to wait until 2017 before we could launch an affordable kitchen garden utilizing these technologies.

The T-series was introduced in spring 2017, but it took until spring 2018 before we could launch it for the big public. Where Herbie introduced indoor gardening for consumers and Genie provided a unique set of design and materials, the T-series kitchen gardens brought urban gardening for the big masses with its unique intelligent features.

The T-series is the only kitchen garden on the market that is fully automated and that with a press of a button creates perfect growing conditions for any species of plant you want to grow. The ease of use and the versatility are something that we are very proud of.

“Ten years ago not I nor any of my colleagues knew what an adventure this journey into urban gardening would be. Most of us who came onboard at the start are still a part of the Tregren team, I guess this is a proof that it has been fun and challenging to shape the indoor gardening market. Our motivation comes from the knowledge that we are helping to save our planet while working with wonderful customers. Our inspiration is the feedback and ideas we get from our customers and partners. There are many new products and solutions waiting to be developed and launched, so the next ten years will be even more fun and action packed. The truth is that we have just scratched the surface of urban gardening, food tech, circular economy and the possibilities to reduce our ecological footprint.“ says Markus

Our pace isn’t slowing down in the future. On the contrary, we are working on several new exciting projects currently. We are developing products for vertical gardening, air purification and high yield units for homes and business. We have already patented our vertical garden solutions and we will continue to create novel innovations that help increase the standard of living while saving our beloved planet. In the next post of this series we’ll look into this and show you a glimpse of what the future might bring with it.