SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sēd Communications, a female-run, first-of-its-kind marketing agency founded by advertising and PR industry veteran Loretta Markevics, is proud to officially launch The Greenhouse, an in-house incubator within Sēd that invents brands and products to directly support the startup community. Brands created in The Greenhouse are also used as testing grounds for trying out new marketing innovations, tactics and technologies before they are recommended to the agency’s current startup clients.
“Through the addition of The Greenhouse within Sēd we are able to provide an ecosystem of support for the startup community beyond marketing services. The brands we are developing in The Greenhouse will benefit startups in a variety of ways, from creating platforms that give startups more visibility to potential customers, to helping startup companies recruit new talent or providing specialized access to wellness for founders,” says Loretta Markevics, Founder of Sēd Communications.
The plan for the Greenhouse is to launch one new brand per year and any profits to be invested back into marketing those brands. Sēd’s agency team supplies all marketing support for the Greenhouse brands and as the owners of the brands they launch, the agency will use Greenhouse brands as a testing ground to experiment with new marketing tactics, technologies, and approaches.
“I’ve always loved startup brands because they’re willing to take risks – but they have to be smart and can’t afford to make mistakes given the stage they’re in. The Greenhouse allows us to pressure-test emerging tactics and technologies on the brands we create, like the metaverse or AI, and see proven success before recommending that our current agency clients invest in them to market their own brands. When every dollar counts for startups and digital marketing tactics and algorithms change every other week, it is more valuable than ever to know something works before recommending our clients invest in a new or unproven marketing approach,” says Markevics.
The Farmers Finds
The first brand launched by The Greenhouse is The Farmers Finds, a subscription service that provides a platform for farmers market-born brands to expand beyond their local footprint. Launched in late 2021, The Farmers Finds has grown to more than 1,000 subscribers in under six months of operating in stealth mode.
The idea for The Farmers Finds was born while Markevics was traveling across the country from 2020 until 2021, living in growing startup cities. During more than a year on the road, she visited farmers markets all over the United States to get to know the communities she was visiting and to speak to founders like herself to gain some insights about startup food and wellness brands. She quickly found that the non-produce farmers market brands did not have a unifying platform to promote themselves. Markevics put her marketing agency to work to create one and Sēd test-launched the first subscription box to give these farmers-market-born startups national exposure.
“It’s been an absolute joy working with Farmers Finds. They are great communicators and clearly in it to support US, the small business suppliers. In six months, they have gotten our products into over one thousand new households across the country.” – Caleb Mangum, Nutty Novelties
“With the marketplace the way it is today and with digital changes that happen so quickly, it’s harder than ever to sell. As a small business owner, being a part of The Farmers Finds has been very rewarding. I am able to connect with customers from across the country with more speed and ease than I could develop on my own. I am passionate about supporting other small businesses like mine, and The Farmers Finds allows me to be associated with other high-quality purveyors to enrich consumers each month in a fun and easy way.” – Monica Cutillo-Cody, Farmstead 1868
Supercharging Startup Growth
As a young startup agency, Sēd is also proud to announce that it is currently supporting ten startup brands, doubling its growth year over year since launch. The agency has added brands across categories including beauty, wellness, technology, solar, healthcare, cannabis and nonalcoholic spirits.
The Sēd name and brand come from the premise of supercharging small seeds of ideas into high-yield, differentiated yellow seeds capable of exponential growth. In her previous life as an award-winning, C-suite PR and advertising executive for some of the biggest agencies in the world, Markevics frequently used startups as a source of inspiration or put them on her competitive watch list for clients and decided in September of 2020 to use her over twenty years of experience providing strategic counsel to big global legacy brands to help startup brands win against them.
About Sēd Communications/Loretta Markevics
Loretta Markevics is a marketing visionary triggering hypergrowth for startup brands as the founder of integrated marketing agency Sēd. Loretta is using her previous experience as a global PR and advertising agency C-suite executive providing strategic counsel to the biggest brands in the world, to help startup brands win against them. Sēd’s approach helps startups differentiate themselves through category eruption: a reordering of category leadership by redefining the codes and conventions that define it. An understanding of the vulnerabilities of big brands, a passion for the underdog, a reputation for bold marketing ideas, and an innovative spirit enables the agency to deliver against this promise.
