Dyan Twining – Roost & Root
Description
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-837" class="wp-caption-text">Dyan Twining – Roost & Root</figcaption></figure><figure id="attachment_838" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-838" style="width: 664px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-838" class="wp-caption-text">RoostandRoot.com</figcaption></figure>Dyan and her husband Montie co-founded Roost & Root to help you, “Find your inner farmer.”
Join us for a fun conversation as Dyan talks about the companies journey from building their first 20 chicken coops to the amazing ride they’ve had serving and building relationships with customers from coast to coast.
Be sure to checkout their quality Cedar Chicken Coops and Gardening products as well!
➡️ Call Today – (877) 741-2667
Transcription
Dyan: Hearing from customers because I do talk to a lot of them after the sale. Like there’s always like a driver who’s like, “I’m gonna get chickens,” and then there’s other spouse a lot of times he’s kind of like, “okay, not super excited about this, but whatever.”
And I hear from the other spouse that’s not super excited and like, had no idea I would love having chickens.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.
If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.
You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.
Brian: Dyan Twining co-founded Roost and Root in 2013, with her husband Montie, their passion and slogan is, “find your inner farmer.”
At Roost and Root, they manufacture high quality backyard farm and garden lifestyle products that help fulfill that slogan.
She enjoys keeping chickens and gardening as well as deep sea fishing and running.
Dyan, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Dyan: Hi, thank you for having me.
Brian: Yeah, it’s great having you here.
So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do?
Dyan: So together with my husband, we run Roost and Root, like you said, we are manufacturing company based out of Dripping Springs, Texas.
So we’re a little bit west of downtown Austin, and we have a manufacturing facility where we we started in 2013 manufacturing and selling chicken coops primarily chicken coops.
In 2020, we actually changed our name to Roost and Root. We used to be Urban Coop Company. But we sold our coops through the years and we kept getting a lot of customers saying, you know, “what else you guys going to build?”
They liked our products. They liked the quality, and what goes hand in hand with backyard coops, and its gardening products.
So we changed our name to Roost and Root, to kind of reflect both of our interests.
Brian: Fabulous.
So what led you into the business to begin with?
Dyan: So my husband is a builder and an entrepreneur and we moved to a piece of property in Texas, and I got some chickens, and I could never find a chicken coop that functioned like I wanted it to.
I wanted it to be easy to clean, I wanted it to be easy to take care of the chickens, give them food, give them water.
So Montie being a builder, I said, “you need to build some chicken coops.”
Well, a little bit more to that.
Montie was a builder, had a commercial construction company at the time, and did a big project for a company and we are leaving to go to town for Thanksgiving.
We drive through the drive thru of this Starbucks that he had helped to build. And we were still waiting to get paid for the work that had been done.
And we’re thinking this whole working for someone else is not so much fun.
So as we’re driving, we’re talking and I say, “you really need to build cute chicken coops, I think if you build cute chicken coops people buy them.”
He’s like, “no, that’s kind of a dumb idea.”
But I had chickens, I had friends who would come here and they say, you know, oh, I want to keep chickens.”
I’m like, “well, you should do it.”
And they’re like, “but I don’t even know how to get started, jow do I get a chicken coop?”
And I said, “well, you should have your husband build you one because that’s what I did.”
And they’re like, “my husband can’t build me a chicken coop.”
And so it just kind of sparked the idea that maybe there was something because we are close to Austin, we’re probably a suburb more than our own little town anymore.
More and more neighborhoods are popping up.
We don’t live in a neighborhood, we live on a piece of property.
So you know, when you live on a pretty big piece of property, you can kind of have whatever in your yard, it doesn’t have to look pretty, it can just be functional.
But if you live in a normal suburban or urban setting, and you only have so much space in your yard, and you decide you want to take up some of that space with a chicken coop that you’re going to have to stare at all the time you want it to look nice.
You want it to add to the beauty of your yard not necessarily, you know, take away.
That’s when I said, “you know, you need to build chicken coops and they need to be cute.”
He’s like, well, “that’s kind of a dumb idea.”
But he humored me and I came up with a bunch of drawings, and the first 10 or so were ugly. And I didn’t like them. And I said, “no, keep trying keep trying.”
Finally he hit on what is our backyard coop.
And I said, “okay, people, I think will buy that, we should build some.”
And I said, “well build me one, and I’ll try it.”
And he said, “well, if I’m going to build one, I’m going to build 20.”
I said, “okay,” and so he built 20.
And we just tried it to see what would happen.
We put them on Craigslist, and they sold out within about a week, kind of realize that we had something, we knew that if we wanted to make it a business that supported our family, that it needed to be something beyond Craigslist, it couldn’t be just a local thing or a regional thing.
We needed to be able to build something that we could ship and sell nationally.
So we worked with the shipping companies to come up with box sizes, and, I mean there’s so much to it that we really didn’t know at first what all was involved in it.
But the initial design was something that is within about a quarter of an inch of the max size that you can ship in a box through like a ground shipment company UPS, FedEx.
So that’s kind of how it started.
At first,
United States
