Dive Brief:

• Bloomscape, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) plant company, on Wednesday announced it formed a partnership with West Elm. The DTC brand said this marks its first partnership with a major retailer.

• Bloomscape products will be available for purchase on West Elm's U.S. website, according to a company press release.

• The partnership follows a Series A funding round in 2019 in which the company raised $7.5 million. The company has raised $9.2 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Dive Insight:

As the home goods segment gets more saturated, brands are being forced to expand outside of their initial product categories.

Direct-to-consumer mattress brand Casper in 2019 has expanded into the electronics and drug categories with the launch of a smart nightlight and CBD gummies, for example. Bedding brand Brooklinen took a different tack, launching an online marketplace called "Spaces" in October, which invites brand partners to sell on the platform.

West Elm has formed a variety of partnerships with brands in the past from furniture startup Floyd to smart home electronics company Nest. The collaborations provide the company with a relatively low risk way of expanding and experimenting in other product categories without having to develop the products in-house. 

"We saw an opportunity to make plant parenting easier for our customers by offering Bloomscape's beautiful and wide-range collection of plants alongside our assortment of original, modern planters and accessories," Andres Ortega, director of partnerships at West Elm, said in a statement. "Together, we can better serve our customers as they journey into designing and completing their homes."

Plants may be a particularly lucrative category to expand into. Along with Bloomscape, other startups like Urban Stems and The Sill have popped up in the space — and for good reason. According to Nation Gardening Association data cited by Bloomscape, houseplant sales have increased some 50% to $1.7 billion in the past three years. As millennials delay traditional life events like marriage and having children, they are turning to other things like pets and plants to fill the void.