Växthem started in Maja Lindströmömöm's apartment in Södermalm, Stockholm, in the spring of 2019. She had spent three years working as a buyer for a large Swedish home goods chain and kept running into the same problem: the products she actually wanted for her own flat. A terracotta pot with a proper drainage hole, a pendant lamp that did not require an electrician, a linen basket that held its shape after a year. Were either too expensive or impossible to find in one place. She quit in October 2018, spent the winter building the first version of the site, and launched with 34 products in April 2019.

The first two years were slow. Växthem ran entirely from Maja's spare room, with orders packed on the kitchen table and dropped at the PostNord point on Hornsgatan every Tuesday and Friday. The turning point came in the autumn of 2021, when a piece in a Stockholm lifestyle magazine mentioned the site in a round-up of independent Swedish online shops. Orders tripled in a week. Maja moved fulfilment to a small warehouse space in Årsta and brought in one part-time colleague to help with packing. The product range grew from 34 to just over 180 items by the end of that year, still following the same rule: nothing goes on the site that Maja would not put in her own home.

Maja Lindströmömöm grew up in Umeå and moved to Stockholm to study design at Konstfack, graduating in 2013. She spent three years as a product buyer for a large Swedish home goods chain before leaving in October 2018 to start Växthem. Before retail, she worked briefly as a set dresser for a production company in Göteborg, which is where she developed a habit of noticing whether objects actually function in a room or just look good in a photograph. She lives in Södermalm with two large fiddle-leaf figs and a balcony she uses as a test site for every outdoor product before it goes on the site.