Today we’d like to introduce you to Molly Meyer.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees in Earth Systems with a focus on soils at Stanford University, and later worked as an apprentice carpenter for a general contractor. From these experiences, I developed an interest in green roofs and a desire to gain true expertise, so in 2007 I moved to Germany on a Robert Bosch Fellowship to work in the green roof industry. Green roofs are a common part of modern building practices in Germany, so I was able to work full-time year-round learning green roof best practices. I moved there with a vision: to democratize the green roof, meaning to make the green roof affordable and ubiquitous. Shortly after returning to the U.S., I founded Omni Ecosystems to bring that vision to life.
Michael Repkin, who has a background in microbiology and ecological design, and I joined forces shortly thereafter. Mike and I were working in parallel on complimentary green roofing efforts. He had been developing an ultra-lightweight growing media that can be used for a broad palette of plants, while I had been designing, building, and maintaining green roofs in Germany. When Mike and I met, we both saw the friction between the existing technology’s limitations and architects’ goals, and thus saw the opportunity to combine Mike’s developments in growing media with green roof best practices.
In the last eight years, we have established Omni Ecosystems as the leader in green roofing, making great strides towards our vision of green roof ubiquity. To improve the payback period from green roofs and to create community engagement with these natural spaces, Tracy Boychuk and I founded The Roof Crop, Omni’s sister company, which farms our rooftops and sells the produce to restaurants in the West Loop. At Omni, we are now taking this vision to its broader implication: we are infusing the urban experience with nature. We have invented new products, including living walls and soils for brownfield remediation, and added new services, including landscape architecture and construction. I am proud that Omni is now a team of diverse expertise, bringing innovation and integrity to solving environmental challenges.
Has it been a smooth road?
[ Laughs ] It has not even been a smooth road; it has been a rocky, mountainous, off-roading journey. What we at Omni are doing has never been done before, compounded by challenges that arise in the slow-to-change and adverse-to-change construction industry. My personal experience has been countless hours of tremendous hard work, pushing towards our vision daily, driving this thing forward. During the early days of Omni, I was building every green roof – in the heat, in the cold, in the rain, moving bags of dirt and rocks, driving the forklift, wiring irrigation systems, to today where I am no longer in the field, but leading a team of 25, trying to steer us toward our shared vision.
The keys to our progress have been hiring the right people who share in this common vision and have fortitude in the face of challenges. Having a great support system with insightful advisors has provided invaluable help along the way. In forging this path, I am constantly learning. Looking back on the time since I founded Omni, I had no inkling of how much I would learn, and how grateful that I would be for those lessons.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Omni Ecosystems story. Tell us more about the business.
At Omni Ecosystems, we invent new types of growing media, that is soil, and we use it to create working landscapes in the built environment. That includes green roofs that go beyond sedum (the typical green roof plant) with plants like the wildflowers, perennials, ornamental grasses, lawns, and trees, such as the rooftop at 1330 W Fulton developed by Sterling Bay; living walls like the one we built at Nico in the Thompson Hotel; and rooftop farms, that we’ve created many of throughout the West Loop, including the Ace Hotel and Emme. We even provide solutions for remediating contaminated sites. In addition to our innovative technologies that are leading this new field, we are disrupting the traditional landscape industry with our business model. We have a turnkey shop, meaning under one roof we have experts in microbiology, horticulture, soil science, landscape architecture, construction, logistics, and maintenance. I am so proud that we have built a team that can take a project from conception, through design and implementation, to long-term stewardship. This model is very difficult – most businesses want to be involved for a short window and decrease their responsibility. Our clients see value in the higher accountability that they receive by having a steward throughout the process. This combination of our advanced technology and turnkey operations has led to remarkable new ecosystems and experiences that were never possible before. For example, we created the first-of-its-kind rooftop wheat field on Studio Gang Architects’ office in Wicker Park. We worked with youth from Mayor Emanuel’s One Summer Chicago program to harvest and thresh the wheat, then Baker Miller in Lincoln Square milled the grain into a high-grade whole-wheat pastry flour and baked it into cookies! The youth sold the cookies to raise money for their non-profit. It is incredibly gratifying to see this vision literally come into fruition through our innovative technology applied via our collaborative, passionate, expert team. As of last year, we have projects from Boston to San Francisco, but we are proud to be from Chicago, the city leading the way in implementing green technology, like our working landscapes, to help the environment and connect people with nature.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.omniecosystems.com
- Phone: 3123373196
- Email: info@omni-ecosystems.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/omniecosystems/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/OmniEcosystems
Image Credit:
Chris Murphy
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