When the going gets tough, the tough get growing from Marketplace. I'm Sabri Beneshore in New York. We are back again today with the Marketplace Economic Pulse, where we look at the economy through the eyes of all kinds of different people and businesses. And today we go back to Kristen Summers and Ivan Martinez, co-owners of Tula House, a plant shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

They rode the pandemic plant boom and the aftermath. Then they pivoted to also do design and

installation. And now they're facing a whole new world of challenges and still coming out on top.

Small businesses have been dealing with a lot over the past year, whether it's tariffs or most recently high fuel costs.

Does that kind of stuff apply in plant world?

It does.

Yeah.

I mean, where we are up in New York, we have some local vendors, but for the majority of the plants, they come from Florida.

So definitely, you know, fuel prices affect those costs.

We also sell pottery and tools and just household equipment.

And a lot of that comes from overseas, too, from the UK or Japan.

So that we saw a big hit during, you know, even the holidays.

And we've had to raise our prices over the holidays because of all the tariffs.

You know, it's not just the plants.

It's everything that comes along with the plants. So the pottery and the tools and, you know, the soil, all that gets

affected by the economy as well. Rent in New York has been the nemesis of many a business.

And your neighborhood Greenpoint has seen a lot of growth in recent years. I mean, is it hard

to run a plant store

while paying New York rent? Yeah. Hence the evolution of our business model, you know, especially when

the pandemic hit, we're husband and wife. We have two small kids. It hit us pretty hard that we

needed not to have all of our eggs in one basket. So building the service business

alongside the retail business was even more important. And even so now as we go into

...