New growth at Kristy Robertshaw’s Charlie & Jack

New growth

Story by Kate Le Gallez. Photography by Evan Bailey.

Not a lot of good tends to happen at 3am. But for Kristy Robertshaw, owner of plant and homewares shop Charlie & Jack, the early hours of a November morning in 2017 offered a moment of absolute and life-changing clarity.

‘In the middle of the night I was just like, “oh, I’d like to open a plant shop”,’ Kristy tells me, sitting at her kitchen table in her Victor Harbor home. She’d just been made redundant from her much-loved job as a student services officer, and while the idea of starting a business was nothing new – she’d been toying with the idea of an online business – the idea of a bricks-and-mortar plant shop felt like a predawn epiphany.

Our conversation, thankfully, takes place at a much more respectable hour. The mid-morning autumn sun streams through the windows of Kristy’s living room sustaining what can only be described as a veritable jungle of plants. The long limbs of devil’s ivy stretch along ceiling beams, strings of pearls and rhipsalis drip from hanging pots, palm fronds arc over the couch, while cacti and euphorbia stand sentinel behind. ‘We have a motto here, that it’s plants before people,’ laughs Kristy. ‘So, you fit the plants in and then the furniture.’

Kristy first began seriously collecting plants around nine years ago, when members of her family were dealing with serious illness and caring for plants offered small moments of solace. But her new hobby quickly progressed to obsession. Concerned she was annoying her friends by posting too many plant pictures to Facebook, she started a group called Crazy Indoor Plant People Australia, or C.I.P.P.A, roping in her son Jackson to meet Facebook’s two-person minimum for groups. At last count, C.I.P.P.A has over 146,000 members.

The group offers a revealing insight into both the light and dark found in online groups. And while the latter means Kristy and five moderators spend over forty hours each week keeping the community ‘nice’, the former makes it worthwhile. Kristy recalls one chance meeting with a shop assistant, who, as the conversation turned to plants, mentioned C.I.P.P.A. ‘She got all teary and said ‘oh my gosh, I lost my dad and [C.I.P.P.A] helped me through – thank you,’ recalls Kristy, ‘That’s the amazing stuff.’

Above: Housed in their back shed, Charlie & Jack has quickly grown from one room to two, doubling the floor space to display a growing range of (mostly local) ceramics and homewares alongside the abundant plants, each named by Kristy (bottom left).

While online communities can be fraught, she cherishes the community that’s emerged through Charlie & Jack and it’s why she’ll never take the business online. ‘If it was just online, I could be doing anything and it wouldn’t matter,’ says Kristy. ‘It doesn’t have that same feel and soul that it does to me, having a shop and talking to people and helping them.’

After that 3am epiphany, Kristy finished her job just before Christmas 2017, opening Charlie & Jack mere weeks later on 20 January 2018. ‘Only because of my very talented husband [David] and my very helpful family was I able to get that turnaround,’ she says. The family support continues with her children – Charlie and Jackson – lending their names and their time to the business and David (‘Jack of all trades, master of all’) building and fitting out the shop as it’s slowly expanded. Housed in their back shed, the shop quickly grew from one room to two, doubling the floor space to display a growing range of (mostly local) ceramics and homewares alongside the abundant plants, each named by Kristy. She’s now adding a third room for additional storage and – hopefully – a space for workshops, and has two employees, Flo and Annabelle. Kristy wants her customers to succeed in the sometimes fickle sport of plant care and both the choice of plant – her standards are exceptionally high and she sources only the healthiest plants to onsell – and the names are part of this. While the former is perhaps a more physiologically sound argument, you can’t overestimate the power of a name. ‘People say because I name them, they think they keep them alive. They’re scared of killing Doug!’ she laughs.

And there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s delightfully kooky to buy not just a plant, but Steve or Fergus or Bonnie. Kristy had always named her own plants and so her kids encouraged her to continue the practice. This early injection of personality has only grown as the business has grown. ‘Having my own business has changed me in so many ways,’ she says. ‘It’s given me a lot more confidence and if you’re not going to put yourself out there for your own business, then who else is going to?’

But don’t ask her to choose her favourite plant. ‘I can’t say it out loud!’ she whispers, grinning. (It’s you Terry, but don’t tell the others).