Heather Torres
- Heather Torres first started accessorizing her porch with seasonal decor as a hobby.
- After winning a local Best Yard award, the pandemic hit, and she decided to turn it into a business.
- Since Porch Pumpkins was born, it has scaled to a six-figure business, and she's franchising.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Heather Torres, the owner of Porch Pumpkins, a Texas-based seasonal decor delivery company. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Shortly after my youngest son was born, I went crazy with pumpkins.
I'd always admired the beautiful seasonal decorations that the Dallas Arboretum displays each year, and when he was little, I decided to start trying my hand at creating pumpkinscapes at home as a way to keep him — and myself — busy.
It wasn't long before I got good at it. Really good at it. I won a local award for Best Yard in 2013 and just kept trying to one-up myself. Eventually, my friends started asking me to create displays at their houses, and I got the idea that maybe people would pay for professional pumpkin displays during the fall season, the way they do for Christmas lights.
The idea stayed in the back of my head for a few years while I was busy as a stay-at-home mom raising my children. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everyone was stuck inside, it felt like the right time to try to make it a small business to earn a little money and use my talents. I decided I could bring the pumpkin patch to you!
I previously worked in the restaurant industry and knew I didn't want to make one-off custom designs. I wanted things to be super simple, so I created four different packages at different price points for customers to choose from.
The most popular package is the smallest display, which costs $325 and includes about 30 pumpkins of varying sizes. Our biggest package is for the true pumpkin lover, and it includes two 50-pound pumpkins, bales of hay, and all kinds of decorative extras for $1,350. We offer delivery and removal services. You can set up your own display, or we can do it for you.
We just celebrated our fifth birthday, and I never could have imagined how things would take off.
It used to be just me and my husband doing deliveries. Then I started hiring other moms I knew to work as part-time display designers and delivery drivers. I hired three people in my first year, and we completed just over 250 displays.
Now, we have over 20 people on our team, and we completely sold out in 2024. My goal was to decorate 1,000 porches, and we ended up doing 1,052.
It has worked out so that, now, I'm busy from August to December, but then I'm pretty much done in the spring and can be fully present to volunteer at my kids' school and do all the things a mom does, like try to cook dinner each night.
Heather Torres
This year, it became increasingly evident that people were gravitating toward this business and were really interested in my approach. I get emails all the time asking to pick my brain, so in March, I started coaching other entrepreneurs about how to start their own seasonal pumpkin businesses.
I charge $4,500 for two hourlong sessions teaching you all the lessons I've learned along the way — from sourcing pumpkins to creating the decorative displays — and in just the few months since I launched that service, I've helped 12 people, mostly women, launch their own pumpkin businesses across the US.
We had the foresight to trademark our name and logo, so all the other pumpkin businesses popping up have different names. But we're also beginning to franchise, so soon, there will be official Porch Pumpkins locations across the country.
The whole process has really been a gift for my family. I'm just so excited to see how much we can grow from here.
Do you have a unique side hustle or small business, or has your side hustle replaced your full-time job? Email Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert at ktangalakislippert@businessinsider.com.