Behind the Brand: Rare Plant Fairy with Jocelyn Ho

For our first Behind the Brand, Behind the Member, we’re spending the evening with Jocelyn Ho at Rare Plant Fairy.

Jocelyn had demand before she had a website. She was selling through Instagram and private Facebook groups with no ads and no funnel, customers typing “sold” in the comments and orders going out of her spare bedroom. That audience is now more than 250,000 followers, and it still works as a sales channel rather than a marketing one.

Today Rare Plant Fairy runs on 14,000 square feet inside a former truck factory, where every step from propagation to shipping happens under one roof. A plant starts in the tissue culture lab and grows out in the nursery on a vertical ebb and flow system. From there it can sell four ways: on the website, in the RPF app, on a live stream, or on the retail floor. Everything leaves through the packing and fulfillment room, thousands of plants a month.

The lab does more than production. The R&D team propagates ghost orchids, working with universities and botanical gardens in Florida on an effort to reintroduce them to the Everglades as early as next year.

What makes the evening worth it is the vertical integration itself. Plenty of us have considered it. Few have executed it, and you will see what it actually takes, including where the margin comes from and where it disappears when one link slows down.

We’ll start with cocktails and conversation. Jocelyn will then walk the group through in order, lab to fulfillment, with a stop in the streaming room, so you see one chain rather than five separate rooms, and finish with questions about the model and what she’s working through right now.

Jocelyn Ho is the founder and CEO of Rare Plant Fairy, a 2025 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year regional winner, a 2024 Crain’s 40 Under 40 honoree, and a 2026 Tory Burch Foundation Fellow.