Six years ago I had grand plans of selling bonsai online and hosting visitors to my Backyard Bonsai Nursery. To make this a reality I would need a website – and a lot more education!  Skip forward to 2023 and the site looked pretty good…yet still the shop remained ‘An Unrealised Dream’.  All the Blog posts and Projects pages had been uploaded.  I had sections relating to Species Advice and Bonsai  Sitting Services.   Yet their was still nowhere to purchase anything online.  So what went wrong?

Lockdown in 2020:

Everybody was effected by the pandemic and knock on issues it caused.  The biggest for bonsai hobbyists was the crippling price rises associated with packing crates.  Many nurseries saw a fourfold increase in transport and this had to be recouped by price rises.  Shortly after restrictions had been lifted I drove down to Savin Nursery to pick up more stock for a ‘Grand Opening’…

That visit changed my entire outlook.  It was clear that the days of cheaper imports had gone for good.  Without a reliable source of budget stock I knew it would be impossible for me to maintain any sort of credible business model.  I still had a reasonable number of ‘mass produced’ Chinese Elm and Trident Maple but I knew that there were no replacements coming.  This was the point I chose to take my plans in another direction…

YouTube Arrived:

On February 22, 2022 I uploaded my first bonsai video to YouTube under the banner of ‘Expressions of Grace Bonsai’.  Within a few weeks I had my first 50 subscribers and by August had reached the incredible figure of 500!  I was now creating three videos / week and was working fulltime to keep both my trees and content going.  By January 14th 2023 I achieved the milestone of 1000 subscribers and was immediately monetised.  My first payment was a ‘whopping’ 8p from a video about wiring

The excitement of video production and editing took me back to my school days at Upwey High – where I excelled in Drama and Journalism.  Finally, i was able to fulfill my true vocation spurting rubbish in front of a camera.

Any Other Nursery Progress?

I had severely underestimated just how much time I would spend on YouTube and any plans for revamping my website or sorting out a ‘new’ sales strategy quickly dropped off my priority list.  Editing and producing videos took a lot of time and energy and I still had to carry out the regular building work on the bonsai ‘not featuring’ in videos. By this stage I had well over 700 trees in various stages of bonsai development.

I was still selling trees occasionally using Ebay and had started seeing an increase in visitors to the nursery.  The visits were the highlight for me and it was rare for somebody to be ‘in and out’ in less than 2 hours!  I am always more than happy to sell trees from my garden as it does not require the additional stress and costs of packaging and postage.

I was also delighted to be invited to a couple of village events where I was able to share my passion of bonsai – whilst seeing some trees sold too

Monetised after 11 months:

It astounded me just how much work was required to sustain and build the channel.  The monetary gain was negligible but the prospects for growth were very real.  Within a further 5 months I reached 2000 subscribers and was averaging 1000 views / video – which equated to about £5.30.  When you consider each video takes about 10 hours of production time – well I won’t break that down into an ‘hourly’ rate.

The biggest gain for me was the incredible volume of Community Engagement through the channel.  Although it wasn’t financially productive, the number of regular subscribers who kept in touch through comments and other social media outlets was beyond belief.  I now have a strong group of ‘like-minded’ colleagues and a growing number of friends.  Despite the loss of my wife in 2020 I finally believed that my life could start again.

A Change of Name:

It was in early 2023 that I made the decision to change my channel name to ‘The Bonsai Retreat’. This was related entirely to the Google Algorithm and had an immediate postive influence on my growth.  Ultimately, the word Bonsai wasn’t being seen quickly on the search page of mobile devices – the revised channel name has made all the difference.  Of course I do miss being identified as Expressions of Grace Bonsai and I think that is one of the reasons for revamping my website.

By the new year of 2024 my subscriber base had climbed to over 3000 and my videos were regularly achieving 1500 views.  I did have a couple of ‘break-out’ videos, one of which gained 10k views and earned me £43.15.  Certainly not enough to retire on but pleasing none-the-less.  The biggest issue I faced was stopping myself from feeling a ‘failure’ because other channels were doing much better than me.  I started around the same time as 5 other creators and they were all achieving much bigger success in growth and video views.

However…I just had to remind myself that my primary aim for YouTube was: rebuilding my self-esteem, gaining  confidence and building a circle of friends and colleagues.  This I most certainly have achieved, so anything else is just a bonus

The Future:

I have taken the decision to reduce my uploads to 1 or 2 per week which will allow me more time in the bonsai nursery developing my trees.  I am currently planning the uploads for the new season and intend to maintain my chatty VLOG style approach.  I am definitely not knowledgeable enough to be considered a ‘teaching channel’ but my experience is enough to appeal to the enthusiastic bonsai hobbyist.  But I will leave you to decide that

This website will become ‘BLOG’ centred and will allow me to promote new uploads as well as give regular informal updates on things planned for The Bonsai Retreat.  I will work on promoting my Bonsai Portfolio pages which will provide a pictorial timeline of ongoing projects. I will also be running a Calendar which will allow viewers to see when I have certain bonsai work planned throughout the year.

I still sell Bonsai from the nursery and via personnal approaches using the contact page.  Visitors are also welcome and all I ask is that you let me know you are coming to ensure parking is not an issue (I live in a small cul-de-sac).  I am literally 5 minutes off the A1 and 3 minutes from Burger King and KFC…

I shall also be looking to promote the ‘Accesss Bonsai Management System‘ developed by my daughter to allow others to benefit from this ‘free’ application.   I have a lot of development plans in store for the nursery itself which will include new ‘sponsored’ display and work benches.  But for now…

All the best & Happy Bonsaiing

Xavier

p.s.

Please be patient and allow me the time to continue the website building process.  I am happy that it is sufficiently completed to allow a decent experience for viewers BUT I am definitely aware that more work is needed and many pages remain incomplete…