Case Study
Understory Fields
A working farm beneath the hazel canopy.
Summary
A 5-acre flower and foliage farm in Fort Langley, BC, built to vertically integrate supply for sister ventures Giftposy and Okanagan Wedding Co. Year-one planting of roughly 1,850 sq ft, lavender propagated from front-yard cuttings, and a brand mark built around an 1885 Thomé botanical engraving. The site is a Next.js 16 build on Cloudflare Workers, deployed via GitHub Actions.
Problem
Two of the MannVenture portfolio's consumer-facing ventures (Giftposy for retail flower gifting, Okanagan Wedding Co. for wedding décor) depend on the same volatile inputs: fresh flowers and foliage, sourced wholesale, at prices and quality that move week to week. Treating that as a procurement line item means the ventures inherit the margins, lead times, and seasonality of the wholesale market. The opportunity was to convert a working 5-acre property in Fort Langley from a personal residence into a genuine supply line, then give the farm its own brand identity that could stand on its own rather than living as an unbranded back-office function.
Solution
We treated Understory Fields as a venture in its own right, not just a supplier. The farm is a real 5-acre working operation with year-one planting allocated against forecasted Posy and Okanagan Wedding Co. demand. Lavender was propagated from cuttings on the existing front-yard plants, eliminating the cost and lead time of buying starts. The brand identity centres on a base64-embedded 1885 Thomé hazel engraving used as a textured background mark behind a serif U, signalling botanical heritage without leaning on stock illustration. The site itself is shipped as a separate Next.js 16 app on Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext, with deploys triggered by GitHub Actions rather than push-magic, keeping the operational pattern consistent with the rest of the portfolio.
Results
- • Shipped public farm brand and site with a distinctive engraved-mark identity
- • Year-one planting allocated specifically to Giftposy and Okanagan Wedding Co. demand
- • Deployed on Next.js 16 + OpenNext to Cloudflare Workers with GH Actions CD
Website
understoryfields.com →The Challenge
Standing up a real farm on a real timeline meant compressing decisions that traditional farm operators take seasons to test. Crop selection had to be done in year one against the actual SKU mix of Giftposy bouquets and the décor language of Okanagan Wedding Co. installations, not against generic cut-flower demand. Lavender, dahlias, and supporting foliage were prioritized because they show up in both downstream brands. On the brand side, the trap was making the farm site look like every other heritage-aesthetic flower farm; the answer was to build the mark around a public-domain 1885 botanical engraving used as a texture rather than a logo motif, and to ship a clean serif-led layout instead of a romanticized one. On infrastructure, the call was to use Next.js 16 with OpenNext on Cloudflare Workers (not Pages) and deploy with GitHub Actions, keeping the platform aligned with how the rest of the MannVenture ventures are shipped.
Implementation
Timeline: Year-one planting underway 2026
- 1Surveyed the 5-acre Fort Langley property and allocated year-one planting (~1,850 sq ft) against Giftposy bouquet SKUs and Okanagan Wedding Co. décor installations
- 2Propagated lavender from existing front-yard cuttings to skip the cost and lead time of buying starts, locking in a signature input for both downstream brands
- 3Built the Understory Fields brand mark around an 1885 Thomé hazel engraving (public-domain botanical illustration) embedded as a base64 texture behind a serif U, then carried the engraved-line motif into the rest of the visual system
- 4Shipped the marketing site as a Next.js 16 app deployed with OpenNext to Cloudflare Workers (not Pages), keeping the runtime consistent with other MannVenture properties
- 5Wired deploys through GitHub Actions rather than push-to-deploy magic so the deployment surface stays inspectable and CI-driven
- 6Set up the brand and ops layer so the farm reads as a venture in its own right (its own domain, its own identity, its own site) rather than as an unbranded supply line for the sister companies
Key Metrics
5 acres (Fort Langley, BC)
Property size
~1,850 sq ft
Year-one planted area
Giftposy + Okanagan Wedding Co.
Downstream ventures supplied
Next.js 16 + OpenNext + Cloudflare Workers
Site stack
GitHub Actions CD
Deploy model
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