First launched as a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, Modern Sprout later moved into a 1,300-square-foot incubator space with a handful of employees and a vision of the modern urban gardener.
Now nearly a decade later, the company is expanding its footprint once again and will occupy a 39,000-square-foot space at a new office at 2145 W. Grand Ave. that will be used for offices, production and fulfillment.
Modern Sprout signed a seven-year lease at the new location. While the company looked at locations both to the east and west, it settled on the Near West Side location on Grand, in the end moving just four blocks from its previous space.
The company had most recently been occupying 23,000 square feet at the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago (ICNC) incubator space, but after doubling its revenue and expanding its workforce in 2021, the need for a bigger office became apparent.
“As the business has grown, we’ve been in a basement, rented a space off Craigslist and have been in a warehouse,” co-founder Nick Behr told the Chicago Business Journal. “We moved into the ICNC building about seven years ago and that’s been great.”
The new space is “a bump up from where we were at in the incubator building, but that’s why the incubator is there, it gives them a leg up to get their business going,” he added.
Modern Sprout offers an assortment of indoor and outdoor garden-focused lifestyle goods with gardening tools and kits made for urban living. The self-funded brand, co-founded by the husband-and-wife team of Behr and Sarah Burrows, has grown to more than 150 SKUs.
Behr said he looks forward to spreading out and growing Modern Sprout's footprint by 70% while getting his entire team into a single space for the first time as a brand.
“We probably outgrew out of our space nine to 12 months ago,” he said.
Modern Sprout has 55 employees at this time and plans to add 10 more in 2022. Behr hopes to see the business grow 15% to 20% by the end of the year.
With a portfolio of retail partners that includes specialty neighborhood stores and national brands including Target, Nordstrom and Whole Foods, Modern Sprout also plans to expand its retail partners.
Created by "two regular thumb-colored people" inside their Chicago home, per its website, Behr said the company was born “out of necessity."
“It started because we’re Chicago apartment dwellers and we had no place to do a garden, so we had dead plants all the time,” he explained. “We do gardens that are very giftable. So much of the garden industry is pallets of soil with some pots on it. They like to say 'dig, drop, done,' but we know gardening isn’t that easy.”
