Profiles in Power: Moving through adversity

Q. The SummerWinds Nursery location in San Jose, California was recently destroyed by a fire. How has this affected your business this year?

A. Well, we’re right in the beginning stages, so it’s hard to say for sure, but we do have a solid industry insurer, and a fairly comprehensive policy, which includes business interruption insurance, which I think is important for any retailer.

Q. What about the employees who worked at that location?

A. Right now our key, full-time employees, and some of the part-time employees, are employed at our other stores. A few are working at our currently burned-down store, where we’ve stationed one or two employees to greet customers who have just learned about the news. We hand out a bottle of water and a coupon to go shop at one of the other stores nearby to each of the customers. It’s been working pretty well.

Q. What advice do you have for garden centers facing this kind of adversity, whether it be weather-related or due to situations out of their control (such as this fire)?

A. Immediately, before any calamity, I would review my insurance policy and try to get a better understanding of what’s really covered and what’s not covered through an independent insurance adjuster. I would get some good insight as to, whether it covers replacement of my building, business interruption insurance, andcoverage for temporary services while you’re trying to rebuild, but still maybe flying your banner so you keep customers coming into your store.

You also want to be careful whatever you put out to the public. You want to have all of your associates in management on the same party line, and trying not to get inundated or overwhelmed by the press, especially if there’s something that’s environmental in nature, you want to be very careful. That can really come back to bite you.

What we did was hire a local PR company, and within 24 hours we were able to get the word out. It was very inexpensive - less than $1000 to get a very well-written, well-crafted press release. It’s a good way to go, probably not a bad item to have on your checklist even today, so that you know who you would contact if you needed to do a press release. That goes out on the web, as well as to your email list of current customers. Clearly, you want to have all of your customer data lists, financial information and other vital information backed up off-site if you’re a stand-alone garden center. With a fire or flood, it’ll be gone, that’s that.

We were able to get an email blast out to our customers in the area, put it on our website, put it on Facebook; it was a consistent message throughout. Customers responded very well to that information, because they want to know when you are going to open, etc.

So you pull together your team as quickly as possible within the first few days. If you’ve got a marketing person, buyers, operators, whatever your key team is, pull them together and get the message figured out, both out to the public and current associates. Then as best you can, deliver that message, knowing that there will be changes.

Q. We heard that you’re doing something special for the fire department that responded to the fire - what is it?

A. We’re holding a parking lot fire sale, in the parking lot [of the San Jose location]. Ten percent of the net sales will go to the San Jose Fire Department Burn Unit. We’re pretty excited about that, and so is the fire department. They plan to put a candy red fire truck out there in the parking lot to promote it. We’re also doing a Toys for Tots program this weekend.

Q. How will the events of this season change the way you do business next year?

A. Much like other retailers, we’ve recapped what we thought happened, in terms of what moved and what didn’t move, reviewed our product lines and decided what we’re bringing in next year, what new services to look at.

For example, we’re introducing a garden coaching service in all of our stores throughout the chain, where you can hire a garden coach to come out and do a basic garden design, help identify what perennial might look good over here, what annual might look terrific over here, what pots to use, things of that nature. We’ll treat you as a personal shopper in the store, as well. The garden coach will spend time walking through the store with you.

We look at those kinds of deals and say “what kind of service do we need to add?” For example, we want to look at more custom creation stations, where we have a potting station, where it’s actually staffed a couple of days a week on the busy foot traffic days.

This year, we felt that our custom creations or potting station sales, where we have product pre-potted for the customer, was a little soft this year, and so we’re re-energizing our efforts there. We’re going to start celebrating that area more, because we think the grab-and-go market has a lot of potential.

Q. What is your outlook for the 2013 season?

A. I think we’re going to continue to see, as we have this past year, continued improvement in more of a silo fashion. Take the Silicon Valley. There’s definitely a strong employment rebound there, but in terms of our business, what we’re seeing, and I think other retailers are seeing, it’s happening in geography silos.

Up in the north, in the San Francisco area, it seems to be a bigger improvement, consumer confidence is higher, etc. than it is in the very southern bay of the Silicon Valley. I think we’re still going to see some of that improvement, but all boats aren’t going to be raised by the tides [at the same time]. It’s going to happen in pockets.

Q. What is the single greatest challenge facing the industry in 2013?

A. Housing is one of the largest hurdles that we have right now, both new housing starts and housing purchases. Once the new housing picks up, gets some steam, and housing turnover kicks in where new ownership moves in or people just feel better about refinancing their loans, that’s when I think we’re going to see more gardening transpire.

Also, where do we find and how do we attract our next generation of customers? This isn’t a new question for our industry.

Q. Any other thoughts?

A. Just overall, I love the optimism of our industry; I think it’s still there. I do see a continued niche out there in the retail world for our industry. I 100 percent believe in it.

People [should] stay focused and work together as fellow garden center retailers. That can go a long way as we band together in the nation, we’re going to be a lot stronger through the “interdependence of independents.”