Mario Cambardella’s ServeScape delivers Atlanta’s greenery!
Mario Cambardella’s adult life has centered around making Atlanta a more beautiful place. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor’s and master’s in landscape architecture, as well as a second master’s in environmental planning. After getting married and graduating, he started his first business focused on food-producing landscapes and had Atlanta History Center as one of his clients. That business helped him win a design contest with the city of Atlanta, which led to a job as the Urban Agriculture director in 2015. Cambardella served the city for four years, with some of his original projects still in play, such as the urban food forest at Browns Mill, the AgLanta Eats Festival and more.
While working for Atlanta, Cambardella focused on food accessibility. “I wanted farmers to post inventories of what they were harvesting and put it on an aggregated digital farmers market,” he says. “I thought it was important to leverage e-commerce.” That concept sparked an idea for a landscape and plant business in the same vein. Now, as the founder and CEO of Chamblee-based ServeScape, Cambardella connects plant growers with customers, all online. Here, he explains how it works.
How did you start ServeScape?
We launched in March of 2020. My last day as Urban Agriculture director was two days before we launched ServeScape—and two days before COVID shut everything down. Every store was closed. We were the only plant delivery place. We ended up doing $100,000 in our first 100 days in business, and today we have over 11,000 customers.
How does it work?
Wholesalers buy on speculation. I once had to go to North Carolina to pick up trees after a wholesaler had sold the ones I needed for a job. It wrecked the job’s profitability, and I began to understand how important it is to get local materials and have access to them from the customer side. It felt like something was missing. It wasn’t efficient, so I came up with ServeScape. Growers give us their inventories, we post them, and then we provide last-mile delivery for both professionals and homeowners. We offer higher-quality plants directly from farms, often at better prices than traditional retail. Georgia alone grows over a billion dollars’ worth of horticultural products annually. We have more than 3,000 products on our site and over $100 million in available inventory. Customers trust us to select the right plants, and we stand behind that with guarantees. Our return customer rate is around 70%.
What additional services do you offer?
We deliver, but we also work with about 17 independent designers on both commercial and residential projects. We’ll complete more than 500 planting plans this year. We’ve also added installation: When you check out and meet the minimum, the system calculates installation costs so you can add it in one click. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure marketplace. People can DIY or get full support. We meet people where they are. We also have InstaScape, our AI tool, where you can upload a photo and reimagine your space with designs tied directly to plants available for purchase.
What should we be planting now?
June is Perennial Gardening Month, according to the Perennial Plant Association. That includes native pollinators like coneflower (echinacea), black-eyed Susan (rudbeckia) and bee balm (monarda), all of which thrive in Georgia. There’s a big perennial movement in gardening right now.
SERVESCAPE
678.827.2273
servescape.com
@servescape
PHOTO: Joann Vitelli
