Rare Plant Fairy sells rare and hard-to-find houseplants online, shipping from its Detroit facility to collectors across the country. Its customers range from serious collectors hunting a specific cultivar to first-time buyers who just want one beautiful thing for a windowsill, and the company is built to serve both. Every order ships with a live arrival guarantee, a policy that came directly out of Jocelyn's own experience of losing money on a plant that arrived dead.

The in-house tissue culture lab propagates species that are hard to source responsibly, improving quality and consistency while taking pressure off wild populations.

The company exists to propagate happiness through extraordinary plants, and to open up a hobby that can feel closed off from the outside.

Jocelyn Ho trained as a speech-language pathologist and moved from Hong Kong to the US about a year before the pandemic, with no plan to run a plant company. When lockdowns hit in 2020 she started selling plants from her own collection on Facebook Marketplace, made $1,000 that first weekend, and wanted to see how far she could snowball it. She built Rare Plant Fairy in Detroit, a city where she had no connections, no friends and no family, and built the team, the customers and the network from scratch. Today the company is fully bootstrapped with no outside funding or debt, runs out of a 14,000 square foot facility with a team of 25+, and holds exclusive US distribution rights to genetics no one else can sell. Its in-house tissue culture lab doubles as an R&D arm: propagating plants that are hard to source responsibly takes pressure off wild populations, and makes the ghost orchid project possible, with the goal of returning plants to the wild. Rare Plant Fairy sells almost entirely online, shipping rare houseplants to over 100,000 customers through live shopping and its own web store. Jocelyn joined the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program in 2026 to learn how to be a better leader in a growing and ever-evolving organization.