After the pandemic derailed their plans for a gardening and landscaping start-up in Gaza City, they utilized USAID’s support for a sleek digital marketing campaign to get back to business stronger than ever.

Home Garden Company is an agribusiness start-up launched in 2020 by Osama Deeb to market ornamental plants and garden design and maintenance solutions to local consumers and businesses. They had a vision to innovate traditional landscape design services with three-dimensional digital modeling and also introduce a mobile application to clients for watering and maintenance schedules. However, the rollout of their initial business plan was stalled due to COVID-19 and other economic crises.

Home Garden adapted to the challenging economic conditions and leveraged USAID support through the SMART Project, implemented by DAI. SMART helped Home Garden get back on track through a Recovery Plan that included investments in new computer hardware, assistance for website and mobile app development, support for a social media marketing campaign, and the installation of a greenhouse. This allowed the fledging company to offer a broad product selection and establish a market share through sophisticated digital advertising and customer services.

We established Home Garden Company just before the coronavirus pandemic, when the pandemic began, sales became nearly non-existent owing to the tough economic conditions in Gaza, and we decided to close due to our inability to pay salaries and absorb the financial costs that we were forced to carry. 

SMART Project assisted us in re-opening by sharing the costs of constructing the greenhouses, launching an advertising campaign to sell Home Garden, and our products, and developing the website and mobile application, which facilitated our return to the market. We now have nine employees and a large number of customers. And now also we started producing seeding and selling them on the market".