Customer Spotlight: Lavenlair Farm

From tech to agri-business: meet Diane & David, lavender farmers!

Diane and David quit their city jobs to make a go of agri-business, now proud owner/operators of a lavender farm! They sell a range of boutique products both online, and at market locations in the surrounding area. Lavenlair farm is a beautiful and relaxing spot located in the rolling hills of the Champlain Valley of New York, USA.  We caught up with Diane to find out more of their story, and to see how they’re using PayNow in their business.

Tell me more about Lavenlair Farm?

Lavenlair Farm is an ever growing work in progress. Our thought has long been “Make a living, making a life.” We decided to live our dream, searched for the perfect place and found a stone farm house from 1820. We added all the green updates to give it a 21st Century zero carbon footprint; geothermal heat, solar hot water, well water, solar electricity, all sourced locally. In 2013 we hand built the “Laverinth” a 100ft diameter, lavender planted, Petit-Chartres meditative labyrinth. In 2014 we added 1600 lavender plants and in 2015, 2400 more. We have 22 different varieties for our “U-Pick” lavender field and business is growing by leaps and bounds.

How did you come to use PayNow for your point of sales mobile payments?

Our tech success is largely due to our four children, all in their 20s. The youngest two are twin boys, who saw me at the market trying to process credit on my phone by going to stripe.com and working through the dashboard. It was a nightmare on a rainy screen in bright sun with lots of impatient customers (and me being in my 50s and needing reading glasses which were not always handy). They said, “Mom, there’s an app for that” and took my phone and set the whole thing up. I literally said to them “you know those nine months of being 70 pounds heavier and hours of labor bringing you two into the world? Consider it paid back with interest!”

Your app has been an enormous key to our success. Processing cards with it is super quick and easy and people spend more when they can use credit. We can’t use a plug-in card reader because as farmers out in the dirt and rain we need a heavy duty phone protector case (we use Otter Box) and the jacks on the swiper aren’t long enough to go through the case. Our website shop (designed by a friend of our younger daughter, again, thank God for tech savvy children) runs on Stripe, so your app is fully integrated. The whole setup works really well for us.

What do you appreciate most about the app?

What I appreciate most about the app at this point is my direct connection with you, a real person, not just some anonymous “tech support” auto reply. That makes such a difference. Please know that you are helping two people make a living while making a life worth living, together sharing their love of each other and of nature with the world.

Maeve Lander is an experienced software engineer from Western Australia, and founder of PayNow. Outside of work, she loves rock climbing, and is a keen musician (jazz trumpet).