Hard Work Leads Quontay Turner ’11 to the Emerald City

If, as the old adage goes, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, then Quontay Turner ’11 is very lucky indeed. She took the leap as a full-time small-business owner and opened Emerald City Plant Shop in May 2021, a mere five months after spotting an empty storefront on Washington Street in downtown Norwood, Mass.

“I heeded the call, and everything kind of fell into place. People have flocked to it,” says Turner, who also sells her tropical plants at various pop-up shops, including one on Newbury Street in Boston.

The initial success of the cozy plant shop and event space—that she describes as an “indoor tropical oasis”—is the result of hard work by Turner, who for years fulfilled her creative passions in her spare time while also holding down traditional full-time jobs. Now fully committed to entrepreneurship, she is finding joy sharing her knowledge of plants and their care, as well as continuing to foster a sense of community in her overlapping worlds.

“The best part is helping people who had struggling plants that are now thriving. That comes from my genuine love of plants and sharing that passion,” she says. She calls herself a plant matchmaker, asserting that even self-proclaimed brown thumbs can be successful. “There’s a plant for everyone; you just have to find it. My goal is to get everyone in my life to have a least one plant.”

This love of horticulture was passed down through her nana, who gifted her with a few clippings that soon grew to take over Turner’s home. “It was great self-care practice for me. I was living alone, before I got my dog, just me and my plants. It was very therapeutic to see them grow. That’s when I realized there was no real place to go to get information on how to care for these plants.”

The seeds of her business began in 2015, when she started selling her Black pop culture-inspired artistic projects online and at pop-up shops, under the business name Q Made It.

“I’ve always been creative and crafty, and I seem to be able to identify a need and fill it. I would essentially make things for myself that I liked—specifically things that speak to Black pop culture—and other people would like them too. I started saying, ‘Maybe I should do more of this,’” says the Mattapan native who double majored in civil engineering and environmental studies.

Then in 2018, while at Emerson, a Wakanda-inspired pin went viral after being featured in a national news story. “I was basically reading applications all day,” she says, “filling orders at night, and I couldn’t continue to burn the candle at both ends.” She eventually quit her admissions job to devote more time to Q Made It, but when the viral interest in her pins waned, she was forced back into the job market, this time exploring other career options, such as diversity and inclusion consulting work.

Furloughed from a job at Eversource at the beginning of the pandemic, she joined CommonWealth Kitchen as the food entrepreneurship programs manager helping new food businesses in Boston get their start. She also worked part-time at Niche Plant Shop in the South End, where she soaked in all she could about tropical plant care and how to run a small business. In December 2020, after a successful month-long holiday pop-up selling plants at Legacy Place in Dedham, customers began asking how they could continue to support her. That’s when she spotted the empty storefront and Emerald City Plant Shop—a name that comes from her love of all things green and her emerald birthstone—was born.

Turner says the rewards of running a small business are many, as are the challenges.

“Because it all came kind of fast, the finances can be difficult,” she says. “I’ve been able to crowdfund the money I need to keep it running, but we’re a self-funded business. Without access to capital, sometimes that can be a struggle.” She also had to learn how to navigate the industry, which meant incorporating as an LLC so she could connect with the massive nurseries in Florida that supply her plants. “I had a little bit of exposure to it having worked at Niche, but I had to learn a lot on the backend.”

A distinctive element to Emerald City Plant Shop is that it also serves as an event space that can be rented out for use by community groups or private businesses.

“Being a Black woman is very much part of my identity, and creating a space that is inclusive of everyone is at the core of what Emerald City is,” she says. While a student at WPI, she was a member of such campus affinity groups as the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Black Student Union, which showed her “the importance of building community in places that weren’t necessarily designed for us.”

To help other Black professionals in Boston, she became a lead organizer of the Boston Young Black Professionals in 2012 as a way to make friends, network, have fun, and give back to the community. Now more than 2,000 members strong, the organization has sponsored events such as Boston’s Black-owned Business Pop-Up Market, monthly networking events, trips and parties, and opportunities for community service.

Turner’s future plans are ambitious. First, she intends to open another shop in Massachusetts to learn how to manage a business that’s not located minutes away from her home. Then she wants to open similar stores in other major cities—such as Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.—where she realizes “there aren’t many plant shops, let alone Black-owned plant shops,” she says. “Being able to bring Emerald City and all that it represents to other cities is a huge goal of mine.”

She’s also restarted her GoFundMe page to raise more capital to purchase a delivery truck and expand event offerings. And for mental health reasons, she hopes to “scale back and be able to enjoy myself in the one or two things I do decide to do.”

The lessons she learned at WPI—especially how to work in groups—continue to shape her, even if she has taken a non-traditional career path.

“A lot of people who find out I graduated from WPI will ask me, ‘Why aren’t you using your engineering degree?’” she says. “WPI taught me to think comfortably on my toes, pivot quickly, and problem solve. That has definitely helped me as an entrepreneur. WPI was almost like a boot camp for entrepreneurship.”