03/29/2026
💚 A message from us 🌱
❤️ Please read 💬 important update on orders 📦
⚠️ We’ve had a difficult start to 2026 — here’s what’s going on and where we stand. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
A word to our beloved customers,
As many of you are probably aware of by now, we have had some unexpected difficulties in 2026 that prevented us from fulfilling orders as quickly as we would have liked. There has been a series of major events that were out of our control and we have done our best to stay grounded and keep moving foward. This situation probably started with a water breakage in December that lasted over a month and forced a quick move. We can say that we were still recovering from the previous Canada Post strike, but we are not here to make excuses. Many events kept putting us to the test and we have always kept moving forward and honoured all orders and our refund/return policies.
It has been quite a journey since it all started a little over 5 years ago. A little bit about myself, I have travelled and lived all over Canada over the years, and worked on hundreds of farms, orchards and vineyards across the country. I was working in BC in the wine industry when I came back to my hometown in Montreal during COVID to get closer to my grandmother. I started a small eBay and Etsy business in her basement, at first with only a "20 varieties garden pack" that I was selling at cost and giving away my labour for free. The very first week, it sold several thousand dollars, and it has taken over my life ever since. I kept adding new varieties and more interesting heirlooms. I was especially fascinated by those with a deep history and unusual looks. While building trust and connection with local growers, we passed the 400 varieties mark and opened the website www.ecoseedbank.com. It is only this fall that we closed the Etsy and eBay shop to focus fully on the website.
I love what I do and I always do it wholeheartedly. But yes, five years later, life is starting to catch up to me. As much of a hobby it was for me at the time, it has become something that has taken over my life, not in a bad way, but as a few of you may suspect, running a small business is demanding. I love to garden, that’s for sure. I love gardeners, their hands-on attitude. I love this industry. I love everything about it. I am exactly where I once wished to be, but right now I wish to be further along to offer great products and better service. There are so many beautiful projects I wish to conduct, but honestly, I am stuck in the daily operations. I sure miss the freedom of roaming from farm to farm and moving with the seasons, but now in my late thirties, a cowboy has to slow down.
I signed up with a sincere passion for this job. It is more of a calling of God for me or some destiny I had to go through. I signed up to save old varieties, to promote organic gardening and old techniques, to promote homesteading, self-reliance and community support. I signed up to participate in a world of agricultural innovations, and I know this kind of company must also become a media company to survive long-term. I signed up for the quiet life on the farm raising chickens and maybe even one day children. Five years later, it has taken a toll on my life, on my health, and not getting any younger.
What started from my grandma’s basement moved a year later into a commercial location with a huge garden. This was a dream at the time and I enjoyed every step of it. I will always have good memories of the sleepless nights of fulfilling orders and hoping for the best in the years to come. But yes, probably because I am not the best manager, this moment has never fully come. It has become a never-ending spiral of bureaucracy and paperwork and form-filling, daily random bills, employees that depend on the company for their rent, suppliers’ costs going up, accounts and taxes, and everything else that goes on in a normal business, I guess. Maybe I should have taken bigger risks and gone deeper into debt and taken loans, government grants and more support, but at the same time, it is a pleasure to grow a small business organically without constraints.
But yes, the elastic is reaching its breaking point. As a small business owner, juggling probabilities is a daily routine. The amount of labour involved in the business slowly became too much compared to revenue. It would be easy, and a dream, to hire an infinite number of employees for every task, but to be healthy on average, a small business needs $300k revenue per employee, so we cannot be 20 people here like we sometimes should.
From mid-January until mid-February, we put up messages on our website and social media about some delays in shipping. We had to move quickly for force-of-nature reasons; we had to reluctantly pause daily shipping for the first time in 5 years. We expected daily shipping to resume quickly, but some technical difficulties got out of control.
The very first day we moved into our new location, we had to break the lease due to a breach of the agreed-upon terms. We then ran into supplier issues while moving the walk-in fridge to the other location. We had a big promotion during the 2025 holidays, as we turned Boxing Day into Boxing Week. When we finished shipping those orders, we were already late on schedule.
So yes, I know there has been some miscommunication on our part regarding some of the delays. We have been fully installed now for a few weeks, and we are almost done catching up on orders. We are working overtime every day and every weekend since. We ship about 100 envelopes and boxes per day. This backlog must end at some point. For orders with a tracking number, we still email the details, and some other orders are shipped without tracking, which makes things seem even longer. We have honestly been doing everything we can, given the circumstances.
In normal times, we are able to handle the flow of messages in our email inbox, by phone, on our website’s chat box and on Facebook, Instagram, etc. But yes, recently we have had to skip a day to focus on something urgent, then a day became two and then something else more important happened and we got caught up in a spiral we can’t seem to escape without me right now taking the time to explain the situation in detail.
If I spend the day answering messages and phone calls, I will just scratch the tip of the iceberg and exhaust a lot of energy. I am very compassionate and I very much understand the importance of timing in a garden. I have trained 3-4 people since we moved into our new warehouse, but the person who was meant to help with customer service did not work out. I must spend my energy on fulfilling orders and training and guiding new employees. I normally have so much time to talk at length with customers on the phone or exchange emails, but I was just overwhelmed this winter by life. I understand that I need to detach from daily operations to be better able to manage this lovely business. If God forbid, I get sick or take vacations, which I haven’t done in 5 years, the business wouldn’t run without me.
What was a good problem at first has turned into a real problem after a few years.
Although this situation (under insurance claim review) had impacted our revenue by a massive percentage and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, quitting was never an option. We are still honouring all orders and shipping daily. I do some refunds non-stop when I get into customer service, we always have and we will keep doing what is right. But yes, we have intentionally slowed down sales. This situation has to end soon, we are shipping every day several times the volume of incoming orders.
I have a friend who will come help for free in the next few days, to help with customer service, and try to save us a bit. Please be patient with her. We are noticing the many recent Google reviews and Facebook comments, and rest assured that we do reply to all of them. Some people are literally calling the RCMP, the Better Business Bureau, contacting Shopify, calling their banks, some want us down and suffering, others are outrageously rude and many think we are a scam or from another country.
I am not a website programmer, but I built this website from scratch. All descriptions were researched and corrected and proofread; no AI was used. All paintings are hand-painted with patience and care. All seeds are fresh for 2026 and well-kept and packed with love. It is a logistical issue that is slowly taking over, but we are not disappearing or going anywhere. Please rest assured that we will make sure that everything is okay. As always.
Thank you x1000 for your understanding and wishing you a peaceful and abundant gardening season,
Sincerely,
Jean-Nicolas and the Ecoseedbank Team.
