Cultivating Deep Water Culture
HydroBucket has been growing in the field of Deep Water Culture (DWC) for several years now. We at Grozine had the pleasure to speak with Mitchell Gorgichuk, one of the company founders and highly visible online DWC guru about what’s brewing with HydroBucket in 2024.
IMAGE: Mitchell, the inventor of HydroBucket, has always been passionate about growing plants, particularly through hydroponics.
If you are into hydroponic gardening and enjoy looking for information online via popular social media channels like Instagram or Facebook, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ve seen a variety of gardens utilizing HydroBuckets. If you haven’t and want to learn more about the product and what it does for hydroponic gardeners, we’ve conducted several real life grow trials and reviews HERE.
GZ: We have been watching HydroBucket grow rapidly for some time now—while enjoying growing a variety of hydroponic crops in our HydroBuckets; how long have you been in business for and what do you attribute your success to?
MG: Only around 3 or 4 years now. Yes, it’s true, we have enjoyed a lot of people adopting the HydroBucket in a relatively short amount of time.
Besides having an innovative hydroponic idea that’s affordable, we think a big part of our success can be attributed to us being available for direct support.
Heck, I’ll spend time helping hydroponic deep water culture growers who aren’t even using a HydroBucket. We find that they eventually do end up growing using one of our kits because they learn the value of it.
GZ: How did you and Dennis Huntley, co-founder, get started–what inspired the creation of HydroBucket?
MG: We have actually been working together for close to twenty years now, in the capacity of well site consultants from the oil drilling industry. As a matter of fact, within hours of the first time we met and were working together on a site we started discussing entrepreneurial opportunities. Seems we both have the entrepreneurial spirit strong with us.
Our first venture together had to do with golf carts and GPS–while that one never really took flight, we gained a lot of experience in business and product development.
Three or four years ago I started growing at home. I quickly learned that hydroponics was the way to do it and it wasn’t long before I could see there was a way to make a good thing even better–and certainly easier. When I brought it up with Dennis, he loved it, and away we went with bringing the idea to life.
GZ: What were some of your earliest challenges when starting up HydroBucket?
MG: Oh, that’s easy. Definitely capital. We knew the idea was sound, and we had spent some time developing and refining the initial HydroBucket design with the help of some 3D printed prototypes.
However, once it came time to produce the product and it’s parts on scale, things got expensive quickly with tooling, molds, materials, etc. There continues to be a bit of a learning curve in terms of refining products and creating new versions of parts, etc when it comes to using the right type of plastics, like HDPE primarily.
GZ: Well, from our vantage point it looks like you were able to overcome those challenges and then some—so, if you don’t mind us asking: what continues to be a challenge now that your brand and product are established in the hydroponics gardening industry?
MG: Thanks and don’t mind at all. Shipping and logistics have proved to be an expensive learning curve as we have grown to service more and more clients over an increasing geographic area. We are happy with the fact that we can offer free shipping now on most orders.
Our early growth was largely organic. People used our product, liked the support and were happy to tell their friends and share with other hydroponic and would-be hydroponic gardeners. Now we are beginning to implement data based marketing strategies. So we’re always learning something new as the business continues to grow.
Early on we just offered the HydroBucket with the side access lid—as time went on and we worked with more of our customers we learned that people wanted a total solution from us. Naturally, we listened–so we now have complete kits for a single plant or multiples, including specialized kits for raising transplants via DWC.
GZ: It’s been exciting and inspiring to watch HydroBucket grow. Looking at your new website definitely drives home the point you were making about offering complete packages and kits. Very nicely done! Can you share any insights as to future developments for HydroBucket?
MG: For sure! We are continuing to cultivate our complete solutions approach to help make sure it’s even easier and more productive than ever to grow your favourite plants the HydroBucket way.
As you know, I work every day with growers who have questions about their hydroponic gardens.
The more we’ve seen people adopt our kits and packages, the easier it has become for them to be successful–basically, by helping to remove “X” factors or unknown variables.
We decided to build on this–so we are further developing our line-up to include other essentials like nutrients, lights, controllers, grow tents and more. This way, customers can get a better price versus buying all these separately from different sources.
However, most importantly, they can rest easy knowing everything is going to be reliable, sized right and complete. It also makes it easier for us to offer support, because we will know what tools our clients have in their box, so to speak.
On top of this, we’ll be offering free webinars that should have appeal for everyone. Whether just starting out growing in Deep Water Culture to experienced growers looking for additional gains from their HydroBucket gardens–after the webinar they’ll be able to take away all the information in a tidy easy to reference package as well. We’re really excited about this!
