About Magic Garden Seeds
From the beginning until now – a potted company history
When the company was started in Hessen in 1997 it happened more or less by chance. Andreas Fai-Poszar, the company’s founder, was training as an alternative practitioner and was interested in particular herbs and medicinal plants that simply weren’t available in normal garden centres at the time. So he started searching for the seeds of these plants and in the process – without consciously setting out to do so – began building up a network of small seed producers worldwide, in order to obtain seeds of the rare varieties he wanted.
These ethnobotanical specialities were soon joined by old, historic vegetable varieties – in 1990s Germany the range of vegetable varieties available in supermarkets and even in farmer’s markets was still very restricted. At that time plant breeding was focused exclusively on very high-yielding, vigorous varieties that were well adapted to machine-based cultivation systems.
Andreas still had seeds to spare after using some himself, and soon found himself offering these to other people, producing a kind of small seed catalogue his customers could use to order seeds by post, sending postage stamps as payment.
Then, after a party in a student accommodation block, Andreas got his friend Harald Schreiner involved. They set up the company together and quickly moved into online retail – making Magic Garden Seeds one of the very early pioneers in selling seeds online.
In 2007 both of them moved to Regensburg. Their business interests went different ways but they remained friends and shared the same office facilities. Over the years the range of seeds on offer naturally grew – today the company offers more than 1,000 different varieties. At this point it was still a one-man operation – Andreas was doing everything. The seed range was very strongly influenced by his personal interests and preferences. Many unusual and rare varieties from all over the world had been added and were lovingly filled into packets by hand, as a cottage industry.
In 2015 Harald came on board again, now as managing director and partner of a limited company. His entrepreneurial know-how and extensive experience in online retail helped the company grow bigger and become more innovative. The online presence was updated, the team grew steadily and the business moved into different sectors. Today we produce nearly all our products ourselves, enjoying excellent working relationships with our valued commercial partners.
Selling unusual, open-pollinated seeds is still the core of the company’s business today. But now this has been supplemented by the gift business: today Magic Garden Seeds offers a wide range of fabulous seed kits on a host of fascinating plant themes. These kits are available both in special packaging as high-quality, sustainable gifts, and also in a simpler version as themed kits for our customers to use themselves.
Since 2017 our Advent Calendars have been a highlight of our product range, filled with 24 different organic seed varieties, and with gorgeous new designs appearing year on year. Now there are even different calendar variations on a range of gardening themes.
