I'm so sad to be writing such a negative review, but the owner has left me no choice after receiving such poor customer service.
I went to a personal shopping appointment on December 28th and picked out a lovely monstera. We went throughout the rest of our tour and noticed palettes and palettes of dead plants. Crotons, herbs, etc. There were several heart leaf philodendrons and pothos that had been left for dead too. My friend, who was at the appointment with me, commented on it, and I justified it. "I'm sure plenty of nurseries look like this behind the scenes too. Not 100% of the plants make it 100% of the time. This is what behind the scenes looks like."
But then I had to intervene twice with the pothos I got. I got it home and it began to yellow, no doubt due to the most compact, overwatered soil I've ever seen. I dug her out, inspected the roots, trimmed away some yellow leaves, and combined her with another pothos.
To make a long story short, through a local FB group, a handful of women and I were able to connect over our declining monsteras. Each of us had purchased a monstera from Abby Lee Farms at around the same time and were having identical problems. We were all experiencing black/brown spots surrounded by yellow. All of us have multiple happy and healthy house plants, including other monsteras. All of us were stumped as to what this could be, as were other experienced house plant owners that we convened with.
After going over our various conditions, we discovered the only commonality was where we got them. We reached out to the president and founder via email, and were met with some of the worst customer service skills.
His initial reply to us was helpful in tone (he even offered a smaller replacement), but that quickly faded as we poked holes in his theories. He purported that my problem was that I used neem oil to shine the leaves. That's a common practice of plant care, none of my other plants have similar damage, and the propagations I took from this monstera shortly after I got it home have zero damage. Another woman's problem was that she severely underwatered hers.
He was rudely adamant that the varying conditions of our homes were the cause. He wouldn't even consider the fact that something had maybe gone wrong while at their green houses, even though he admitted to me in an email that they make mistakes all the time (ya know, just definitely not this one). His emails got increasingly antagonistic.
Eventually it became that we needed to return the monsteras we purchased, which we all found to be a ridiculous request considering we had all done the work of removing the infected leaves. What was left of the plants were the healthiest leaves that we could salvage - all of which have incurred no damage since being removed from the soil/mother plant. You would think that if our conditions were the problem then those trimmings would continue to decline too.
All this to say, we are very upset with the lack of customer service skills we were given. The founder and president is too close to the situation, as it's his business, to be responding to customer service emails. We all feel he took things too personally and was unnecessaril
y rude. We are all reasonable women and we know that things happen and that businesses have problems/issues, but what speaks VOLUMES is how problems are handled when they arise. This is probably one of the poorest experiences I've ever had as an adult.
As far as I'm aware, none of us have any intentions of returning to this establishment or recommending it either. read more