Help Soulstice Botanicals Recover After Historic Winter Storm

It's funny how your circumstances can change on a dime.

My husband, Marlon, and I are the owners of Soulstice Botanicals, a mobile plant shop located on Topsail Island in North Carolina. We operated our business from a retrofitted 1998 Bluebird school bus. Folks in our community affectionately refer to it as the “Plant Bus.”

Just this past summer, we were celebrating being featured in Topsail Magazine, a local publication. It felt like our business was about to take off. But last weekend, everything changed.

Due to the worst winter storm in decades, we have lost our inventory of more than a hundred plants. All our beautiful plants—Monstera, Pothos, Philodendrons, and many others—are expected to perish.

If we're lucky, a few may ultimately survive, but it will take months of care. But right now, all of them are too damaged to be sold. We've had to cancel our scheduled events, and it will take months to build things back up.

This isn't the first winter we've dealt with. We had snow last year and made it through without a hitch. The Plant Bus is equipped with an RV heating and cooling unit rated to handle temperatures from 19° to 109°.

Even during last year’s unexpected snowfall, our plants were safe.

This storm was different. We experienced 50 mph winds with a wind chill of 7°, and a foot of snow; the kind of conditions this area hasn’t seen in roughly 40 years. Despite the heating system running continuously, the cold overwhelmed it.

Because Soulstice is a mobile retail business where customers shop on the bus, our insurance focus was always on liability, not catastrophic weather events like this. Given where we live, we never imagined needing coverage for a historic blizzard.

We’ve never asked for help like this before, and honestly, we’re still figuring out how to feel about it. But we’ve poured our hearts, our savings, and countless hours into Soulstice Botanicals. There’s no way we can just quit.

We’re asking for help. All funds will be used to replace our plant inventory so we can reopen, keep serving our community, and continue building the business we believe in.

Any amount helps. Sharing this fundraiser helps too.

Thank you for supporting a small business built with love, resilience, and a whole lot of green.

Shannon Weems

Co-owner, Soulstice Botanicals