On the road: OFA Short Course

Last month’s OFA Short Course in Columbus, Ohio, offered up a wide variety of educational sessions and workshops for those looking to learn more about the horticultural industry and improve their garden center, nursery and greenhouse operations. For those of you that weren’t able to make it to the show, here are summaries of three of the presentations, written by the speakers themselves. Check out www.GardenCenterMagazine.com for even more details about each of these presentations.

Events and fundraisers in the garden center

By Gail Vanik, Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery

We take a little different view of events and fundraisers than they do at many other garden centers. For us, an event has to have some return on investment. We have tailored down our events to those that either make sense financially by providing an ROI in terms of dollars generated by the event, or community-wise by providing a presence or service to the community.

One example of an event that generates a financial return on investment would be our annual Luminaria Night. This event has been running for more than 25 years and is a huge draw during the holiday season. Each year, we fill between 1,000 to 1,500 paper luminaria bags, light, and place them throughout the garden center. Local performing groups are invited to perform. We add to the festivities with homemade cookies, Santa and an elf to hand out candy canes to the kids, and invite the community as our way of saying thank you and celebrating the holidays. In our town of about 8,000 people, if the weather is cooperative, we will have between more than 1,000 people attend. The cash registers are generally busy and the event more than pays for the effort put into it. It has become a family tradition.

A garden center can “event” itself to death. Don’t invent events just to have something on the calendar every month. Be realistic about expectations — some can take years to build. The key to running them successfully is to choose those that are either important to you personally, or have some return on the investment of your time, money and efforts.

Niche marketing: communicating the benefits of our products

By Bridget K. Behe, Michigan State University

Color sells. We often see plants fly out the door when they are flowering, so obviously color and the beauty provides to the landscape is important to many of our customers. But the days of relatively easy and fast growing sales have left our industry for a more competitive marketplace. Now is an even better time to communicate more than just the beauty and color our industry provides. Your marketing messages today need to contain more benefits in addition to beauty.

We can all include some practical benefits. Plants use carbon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight to produce oxygen. While the term carbon sequestration (in fact a function of plants) might overwhelm or confuse some customers, the benefit of that function is to improve our air quality. If General Motors or Apple or another Fortune 100 company could claim that benefit, the most definitely would. Yet, we’re a pretty modest group of marketers but really should claim (using research based information by pointing to some of that on our websites) that tremendous benefit.

Another function some plants do is to provide food. There are so many benefits to this function, but still our modest group of marketers is pretty silent on these benefits as well. This “food producing” benefit is how many consumers from younger generations are connecting with us. Herbs are the first food connection younger consumers make, since they can readily see the use (basil on a Caprese salad, parsley on potatoes, etc.). Vegetables are often a next step for younger consumers, since they want to gain some expertise growing their own food. As retailers, we need to be ready for them with online support for information about potential pitfalls and how to avoid them. But don’t mistake this advice that vegetables and herbs can’t be visually appealing. When communicating benefits, think “and,” not “either or.” Herbs and flowers integrated into containers can be both functional (food producing) and pretty. We need to communicate multiple benefits.

Our marketing messages can, and should, contain the beautification benefits including increased perceived home value. However, we sell more than just “pretty” and in this competitive market our messages need to contain those additional benefits. Consider the many ways you “talk” with your customers, whether that is in person or online. Show and tell the many benefits of plants (not just their features, functions, and uses) and connect in a stronger, more meaningful way with your customers.

Satellite Garden Centers

By Jim Schroer, Plant Place

Call them pop-ups, hoop houses or satellites; they all have one thing in common: they are portable, not permanent. The goal is always the same, sell product and make a profit. I have been operating satellite garden centers for twenty nine years, and will share some of what I have learned in that time.

With margins getting tougher and tougher to come by, why wouldn’t you want to expand your volume of sales if you could do so without having a huge capital investment? How do you choose the right location? Is high traffic enough of a reason? Who will run the satellite since you already have your hands full with what you are doing? How do you drive sales to a temporary location? How do you merchandise on a parking lot?

Here are three key points for starting and running a seasonal satellite garden center. The first and most critical point is location selection. There are many things to consider when choosing the best location: area demographics, traffic counts and roadside visibility are the most obvious ones. Some not so obvious but equally important to your success are your potential landlord’s business model and pricing structure, and your competition and their business strengths and weaknesses. Several other aspects of location selection deal with the actual physical site and how you can make it work for your garden center.

Staffing a seasonal business can be a real challenge. Finding and hiring a quality crew can be tough enough, but retaining these employees from year to year can be almost impossible. We use a combination of incentives and rely on our returning staff to ensure we have very few bad hires. Allowing our managers to interview and hire their own staffs makes them much more motivated to get it right the first time, knowing they will have to deal with any problems that may arise. With such a short season, training can be brief at best, but with the right hires and a combination of written directions and hands-on instructions, we help our employees serve the customer well.

Finally, we allow our staff creative liberty to merchandise their stores (within reason.) Gardeners love to see what others are doing with our plants, and we let our employees show them. Creating curbside appeal and impulse buying with the combination of color and size is critical to our success. With 25 locations, we really don’t have a central plan of how we require the stores to be laid out. Each location has unique characteristics that dictate how we utilize it most effectively. Most of our locations have at least one employee that has a flair for display and will bring in their own items, such as antique pieces, to enhance their presentations. We have found this to add to “ownership” and pride in their store. Pricing is based on a number of factors, but don’t be afraid to ask your customers to pay for the quality that they demand.

Operating a satellite can be a great way to expand your market share and your brand without a huge capital investment.