The Living Christmas Company: rent a living tree that comes back next year

A cut Christmas tree is a strange product: grown for seven to ten years, decorated indoors for a month, then thrown away. Scott Martin saw that waste from both sides — as a teenager delivering trees for a nursery, he would meet the same tree weeks later lying in the trash, and the joy of the delivery curdled. He tried giving friends avocado and other living trees to decorate, until he found a combination that worked and launched a rental service he called The Living Christmas Company.

The model turned the tree into a durable asset. Customers booked online and chose a size and species; staff delivered two-foot table trees up to fifteen-foot institutions' trees in routed trucks carrying 20 to 30 trees per run, and picked them all up again after the holiday. The trees spent the year in pots on reclaimed brownfield land — contaminated or undevelopable property that became an urban nursery — and most returned to customers the following December, geotagged so families could ask for the exact tree they had named.

The economics were seasonal but compounding: one tree could serve two or three families across different Christmases, and keeping the tree healthy beat selling another one. By 2014 the company ran a crop of roughly 3,000 trees, retained about 90 per cent year over year, and employed about 60 seasonal workers. A 2012 'Shark Tank' appearance brought Mark Cuban as an investor, and the business grew beyond its Redondo Beach base into the Bay Area and corporate displays for Whole Foods and Anchor Brewing.