January 2025 Startup Grant Awarded to The Mossery

We’re excited to announce the $10,000 Startup Grant recipient for January 2025. Congratulations to Lilac Frost, founder of The Mossery.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Lilac for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

WomensNet: What makes your business unique from other businesses that are also providing your service or product? 

Lilac: Most people have seen moss out there. The concept is pretty straightforward. You bring nature indoors by using preserved moss. It’s typically zero maintenance and you see them in people’s homes, high rise apartment buildings, high end boutique stores, just to name a few. And at The Mossery we do that, but on top of it, we make sure that every single piece that we create and set is also beautifying the planet. We deeply care about sustainability and unbeknownst to the public, our industry lacks regulation. And this leads to bad players undergoing illegal harvesting and coloring the moss and preserving the moss using things like formaldehyde and plastic based paint. So we have a very different approach at The Mossery. Instead of using chemically treated wood or acrylic based canvases, we use locally found fallen trees as our backing. Sometimes we also use soy based plywood because conventional plywood is neither biodegradable or recyclable. We also invest in food grade paint as opposed to paint that may contain lead and microplastics and chemicals that are toxic. We invest more time and money into sourcing reclaimed as well as biodegradable products. It’s a much more costly process because sustainability is really at the forefront of our business. 

One important thing is transparency. So if you were to go to our website, themossery.co and click into any artwork, you are able to see a list of materials used for that. And so I was inspired by this idea of, you know, a chef who holds integrity to their work will always declare very transparently and honestly in regards to all the ingredients that they’ve used, right? So similarly, I see myself needing to declare that to my audience. And I do that not because I’m afraid of any business competitors copying me. In fact, I welcome more businesses and artists to collectively raise the bar in terms of our environmental responsibility and just do better. I think when we are creating beautiful artwork or a beautiful product, it’s important to not only think about the immediate temporary result, and how our customers feel about it at the moment, but we also need to think about the legacy that we leave behind, both through our process as well as our messaging.

WomensNet: What are some effective strategies you’ve used to let others know about your business?

Lilac: I created The Mossery out of my passion for sustainability. Luckily for me, The Mossery aligns with who I am as a person and my career path. Because of that, it became easier for people around me to find a lot of trust and resonance in the messaging of The Mossery, and I was able to get support from friends in my immediate circle. And Instagram has been our primary social media channel because The Mossery targets the affluent millennial generation. And secondly, I would say partnering up with the local press was also something that was both new and helpful for me.

And in the Austin area, we have reached out to a few press- and Tribeza, was one of our favorite to work with. Their editor in chief, Heidi, she’s very responsive and she’s just very supportive and empowering of a lady boss or a boss really. And I would say that if you want to try out a similar approach, make sure that you do your due diligence in writing up bullet points or articulating your businesses clearly for the writers so they have talking points to go off of, and it just makes everyone’s lives easier. And we believe that professionalism should not only reflect in the product and service that you provide, but also through each touch point and everyone that you interact with on behalf of your business. Lastly, we’re also working on getting our marketing email system set in place. We want to go with an automation email track because after all, it’s just a numbers game and it made a lot more sense. And it’s not as subjective as some of the other approaches or in-person sales. The learning curve of it can be steep if you don’t have experience in working on something like that, but it’s something that we are putting a lot of effort into and hope to see successes.