Jeanna Liu’s love for nature is rooted in her childhood. As a young girl, Liu moved with her parents around the world from Shanghai to the United States. Throughout that time, she nurtured her passion for gardening and helping the planet.
Yet that passion unfortunately wasn’t enough to sustain her plants while her 15-year Wall Street career had her travelling extensively. Desperate to keep them alive, Liu tried everything on the market only for it to fail within a week. This led her down rabbit holes where she extensively conducted her own research and development to hone her own homemade self-watering systems.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and more people became plant parents, Liu realized there was a unique opportunity to help others too. That’s when she decided to found Cowbell Plant Co., launching the longest-lasting self-watering kit on the market designed to nurture the green thumb in everyone.
Let’s take a look at what led to Liu’s head-spinning career pivot into the world of plant care and how she’s helping the world become a greener place through Cowbell.
Not Taking ‘No’ for an Answer
Change has long been the only constant in Liu’s life, having lived and worked in many different countries. Instead, the biggest challenge she found herself facing was all the ‘what ifs’ that come with building something from scratch.
Between graduating from MIT and joining the ranks of Wall Street, Liu had always worked within teams at companies that had established playbooks. There were usually right and wrong answers, and decisions were reached through consensus.
It was a different story when she became Cowbell’s Founder, particularly in the beginning. There were no set answers and a million different paths to take because the company was pioneering a product that had never existed before.
Suddenly, every decision carried significantly more weight that could lead to any possible outcome and pose potentially devastating financial consequences in hardware and manufacturing.
In fact, Liu quickly discovered how grueling the process is to develop and manufacture a product and bring her vision to life. One particularly hard lesson she learned early on is that all the success of developing prototypes can go out the window when manufacturing at scale.
In order to manufacture the product en masse, Liu had to find totally different materials and techniques—while dealing with repeated rejections from factories because of the product’s irregular shape.
Never one to give up easily, even in light of being told that what she wanted to create was impossible, Liu persevered until she found a manufacturer who was willing to try. What she learned from this harsh experience was that being a founder means being hands-on throughout every step of the design-for-manufacture process.
That includes showing up, whether it’s on the ground, at the factories, talking to engineers, solving problems, and putting out fires—even if it’s in other countries. A lot of this learning was on the spot, without the luxury of prior knowledge due to the newness of the product to fall back on.
Remembering the ‘Why’
In trialling times, Liu always leaned back on her reason for starting Cowbell.
“Figure out what you want to build, and why you want to build it. Make sure you have unwavering conviction in both those things. Let that be your North Star,” is Liu’s advice for prospective founders.
Helping others show up as their best plant parent selves is at the core of what Liu is doing. That’s why, when she’s feeling frustrated or demotivated, she looks at user-generated reviews and content. It’s always about the customers and their plants at the end of the day.
It’s also why she persevered in those early days to push the boundaries of agricultural technology and deliver a groundbreaking self-watering product that empowers individuals to nurture their green spaces with ease. Liu has meticulously designed her product to perfectly water every plant so it can live their best (and greener) life.
Beyond helping people properly take care of their plants, Liu is giving them the opportunity to give back to the planet. The importance of water conservation is a topic Liu is all too familiar with, having spent her early childhood without hot running water.
Not only is each Cowbell kit delivered in eco-friendly packaging—the company is a part of the 1% for the Planet movement. Through this initiative, $1 of every purchased box goes towards ocean conservation and reforestation projects around the world.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
