Sustainable Baddie of the Week: Shayla Cabrera of Tia Planta
Plants bring so much into our lives – joy, healing, warmth, and even nourishment. But being a good plant parent is just like being a good human parent. You need a lot of patience, and you’ll need to do some studying before you take on the parent title! Shayla Cabrera of Tia Planta has dedicated her business to helping those of us who find joy and healing in plants level up from plant noob to cool plant dude! Dad jokes aside, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shayla about Tia Planta, her expansion into Cannabusiness, being a Jersey girl, and how to be a better plant parent!
Cabrera is a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur.” At just 21, Cabrera left suburban Morris County, New Jersey for Jersey City, where she has lived for 13 years, and where she planted the seeds (pun intended) for her shop Tia Planta. But before Tia Planta was even an idea in Cabrera’s magical mind, she worked as a high-profile nanny. The job came with many new opportunities and experiences, but also created a high-stress environment. “I worked for celebrities, athletes, politicians and was part of an entourage that helped care for high net worth and high profile families,” she says. “That job was very intense and I developed a very serious anxiety condition that I still deal with to this day and manage on a daily basis.”
It wasn’t until just before the pandemic, in early 2020, that Cabrera began nursing her anxiety through plants and plant medicine. “I kind of tapered out of my high profile, high-stress nanny jobs, and I pivoted towards … finally being able to collect plants, take care of my home, and rebuild that stability that I didn't have when I traveled with these families,” she says, “I just collected common houseplants, and it escalated into me collecting rare pink plants. It grew into an obsession really. I found healing through taking care of my plants coming from this industry that really made me feel worthless.”
The more Cabrera collected, the more she learned about plants and their properties. One day, a friend suggested that they have a photoshoot and sell some of her plants. It was at the onset of a global pandemic, and there wasn’t much else to do, so Cabrera said, “Fuck it! Let’s start a plant shop!”
“I sat and I wrote Titi Planti, Tia Plants, and I kind of just changed out the name a million times ‘till I found Tia Planta,” Cabrera shares, “For me, it represented being an Afro-Latina. I’m Puerto Rican and I’m Black, and it was very important to me to preserve my culture. It’s something I was raised with that made me who I am today, so we started Tia Planta!”
Credit: Shayla Cabrera
Tia Planta was born at one of the most politically, socially, and economically tense moments in history. The question of what the future would be like, or what “the new normal” was, remained a big question mark. Black Lives Matter protests were happening all over the country after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Tia Planta was officially established on Juneteenth 2020. Cabrera posted on her Instagram, “if you wanna support a black-women-owned business, if you wanna put your dollars behind somebody who is passionate about being an entrepreneur, please DM me.” The response was overwhelming. “It was endless, the amount of people that wanted to help me start this business. I’m so grateful for the people that believed in me, that helped me, that were allies…”
Tia Planta is truly a community-built business. Cabrera credits a big part of finding her first storefront location, an abandoned police kiosk, to a woman who worked in the Jersey City municipality. She helped Cabrera submit an RFP (Request for Proposal) to the government to help her take over the space at the kiosk. Together they submitted the RFP to the city council, where it was approved unanimously. They moved in the next week.
“We really do care about the community and we work very hard to feel like we're giving you a hug,” she says, “I would not be here without my community, they give me strength to go on when I feel like I can’t do it on my own. My community is everything to me.”
Credit: Shayla Cabrera
Cannabis and its recreational use were legalized in New Jersey in January 2021 (yay for voting!) and Cabrera started working near the end of last year to get her cannabis cultivation license. “I really believe it's my purpose to help share these beautiful magical medicines that have been used ancestrally for centuries…” she says.
As a result of the anxiety that came with her nannying work, Cabrera was prescribed very powerful pharmaceutical drugs to manage the anxiety. She noticed how they negatively affected her and chose to pivot to plant medicines. She emphasized that prescription medication can be extremely supportive and healing for others, but also that everyone has different paths towards healing, and for her, it wasn’t right to be prescribed such powerful drugs at such a young age. So she learned to manage her mental health with cannabis and mushrooms. “I am not only a cannabis business owner but a consumer. It’s very important to me to be able to share this medicine and destigmatize the plant and the plant medicine in general,” she says. “I think that given today's society and what the norms are, it's really important to me to share alternative medicines outside of pharmaceuticals, especially for people of color and black communities.”
It can be easy to try and group plant medicines under labels commonly given to prescription medicines like “antidepressant” or “anti-anxiety,” but plant medicines like cannabis are entirely different in their composition, their sourcing, and their uses. “A lot of spiritual work has to be done to transcend and get the beneficiary qualities that these medicines have,” says Cabrera.
Credit: Shayla Cabrera
Cabrera’s mission is to help her community heal through plants and plant medicine, and she defied the odds for a small business started at the beginning of… 2020 *sharp strings horror sound effect.* But becoming a cannabis business owner and activist has not come without its difficulties. “No matter how capable I am, there are still huge hurdles in accessing capital in the cannabis industry. Mostly because it's federally illegal…so there's no availability in terms of grants through banks because it is not a federally legally recognized market” she says. “I’m up against corporations, predominantly white male-owned corporations, that have taken a hold of this plant and this industry and made millions of dollars, while people of color are incarcerated to this day. It's a shame.”
“It makes me angry, but anger can be used as fuel to make change, to be an agent of change.” We couldn’t agree more.
On the topic of wealthy white people making marginalized lives more difficult, we got into talking about a topic that hurts my heart to think about, but is a very sad truth for Jersey City and the whole of Hudson County: gentrification and the soaring cost of rent that comes with it.
The cost of living in New York City is so outrageous that people looking to move to the city are moving to Hudson County, NJ as a more “affordable” alternative. Cabrera says, “the cost of real estate, and just the political aspect of cannabis, is a nightmare here in Jersey City and we’re considering having to move and leave the city to move somewhere in South Jersey where it’s more affordable.” Gentrification took my family's apartment, and now my beloved local businesses too! “It’s very difficult to process that, but at the end of the day I’m gonna do what's best for my business because I have a greater purpose and a greater community than just Jersey City, really it's all marginalized people.”
Hudson County property owners are bombarded with predatory letters and phone calls from developers trying to buy them out, and it's no different when it comes to small businesses. Tia Planta has been dodging sharks and predatory offers, “they look for black women specifically… and they give you 51% of the company to make it look like it’s black-woman-owned, and you do nothing. For me that's not good enough. I need a hand in my business,” says Cabrera. I mean… her logo is literally her face!
Credit: The Jersey Journal
She’s not only the face of Tia Planta, but the brains behind the entire operation! Tia Planta works to guarantee high quality clean bud for all shmokers alike. Cannabis is heavily sprayed with pesticides, and Cabrera is searching for ways to make using the plant a safer and healthier experience. “The more I learn about cannabis the more I learn about agriculture, and the misuse of chemicals, and how we consume disgusting chemicals on a daily basis. It's very difficult to manage pests so these harmful chemicals are widely used,” says Cabrera. “You consume cannabis just like how you consume food. So our goal is to make sure that we put out the cleanest product possible. When you’re smoking our stuff, you’re not smoking carcinogens.” It takes a lot of work, it's costly, and it's not the norm, but by prioritizing clean weed, Cabrera is setting the path for other cannabusiness owners to follow her lead. Who knows! Maybe your “freelance pharmacist” will also start saying no to harmful chemicals :)
“I think my favorite plant, it's hard to pick, but currently my favorite plant is cannabis. I think that goes without saying, considering I am a huge advocate for plant medicine and that's kind of where my business is pivoting currently,” says Cabrera. “But when we talk about house plants, my favorite house plant is the monstera deliciosa. I love them, they're so easy and fabulous.”
Cabrera is so great at sharing her plant knowledge in a way that doesn’t feel like the learner is being patronized with big botanical words. As a student who constantly zones out, I was zoomed in when Cabrera offered a few tips for first time plant parents. “Typically, the number one pitfall that I see in new plant owners is overwatering,” she says as I immediately start nervously laughing because that’s how I’ve unalived my plants in the past. “Overwatering is not necessarily the amount of water that you give your plant, overwatering is the frequency that you give your plant water.”“When you water your plants, you want to water them thoroughly. It is common practice to plant your plants in [pots] with drainage holes, so that when you water your plants, you wanna make sure that you see a little water running out of the bottom,” she dishes. “It's a slow cup of tea pour, slowly pour all the way around, just the soil, trying to avoid the plant, until you see water coming out of the drainage hole.”
“That is the key to properly watering your plants. Not waking up, grabbing a glass of water, and dumping whatever is left over on your nightstand” again, I am nervously laughing, until she says, “If it works for you, keep doing it! Don’t feel the pressure to follow a TikTok trend or anything else. If it works for you in your home, keep doing it”
Sustainable Baddies learn to care for plants from the best of the best! Cabrera really is that tia you can go to with your mildly shameful questions, and you know she’ll help you with all her love and knowledge. She’s here to help us grow along with her 🌱🌳