About the Owners

The Full Story...or some of it

Hey y’all! We’re Joy and Crystal, two Black women, proud DC natives, and best friends since the tender ages of 10 and 11.

We met in 1996 at Stuart Hobson Middle School, and we’ve been pretty much inseparable ever since. These days, we both still work full-time in Healthcare and Law Enforcement, so becoming entrepreneurs wasn’t exactly the plan. But you know what they say: Tell God your plans… 😂

Soulfully STEMulated isn’t our first time working together, either. Back in 2002, we were hired to care for children at a local church daycare. They trusted us with the little ones and thankfully, everyone made it through just fine! Turns out, we’ve always been pretty good at figuring things out together.

Plants have been part of our lives since childhood, but after college, we each began building our own collections. Fast forward to the pandemic, when we started caring for a close friend’s plants while also fielding questions from friends and strangers about how to keep their own plant babies alive. Apparently, folks needed help and we were happy to share what we knew.

That same friend saw something in us before we fully saw it ourselves. First, they encouraged us to turn our plant care skills into a business and take our services on the road. We listened, and in 2021, Soulfully STEMulated began providing mobile plant maintenance to residential and commercial clients throughout the DC area. Then came the next nudge: why not turn our pop-ups into a place of our own? With support from an emerging retail grant through DC’s Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED), The Soul Shed was born!

From childhood besties to daycare coworkers, plant enthusiasts, business partners and now neighborhood plant shop owners, this journey has been full of unexpected turns, plenty of lessons and lots of fun!

Where will Soulfully STEMulated take us next? Honestly, we don’t know. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned along the way, it’s that the best things sometimes grow from plans you never made. And we’ll always leave ourselves, and our plants, room to grow!