On the brink

This is the second article in a series profiling BLOOM! Garden Center, a new business in Dexter, Mich. Visit www.gardencentermagazine.com/gc0813-founded-2013-BLOOM.aspx to read the article from August 2013. Look for an update on this up-and-coming IGC in Spring 2014. For more about BLOOM!, visit http://bloom-gardens.com

Traven Pelletier sat on the upright leather chair and wheeled himself toward the wooden meeting table big enough to seat eight in BLOOM! Garden Center’s conference room. Canvassed paintings from local artists depicting forests and flowers were displayed around the room. An interior stained glass window with two tall, yellow tulips offered a view into his garden center, which opened in April 2013. It was a Saturday in September, and things were pretty quiet.

When asked about the status of his business since we last profiled Pelletier in August, he sighed and rubbed his hand back and forth across the table.

“It got a lot worse through the middle of the summer as it continued to be really dead,” Pelletier said. “[August] was really dark as I was looking at the potential of it collapsing.”

Sometimes only a handful of people visited the store, a boutique, garden center, nursery and art gallery, and daily sales were sometimes as little as $80 to $120.

“We’ve been treading water the whole season. It basically became clear by the end of July that it wasn’t going to get better,” he said. “I had to address it, and I didn’t know how.”

Pelletier went to his investor and then to the bank to see if they would lend him more money and both denied his request. He and his fiancé, Kristy Kerr, an artist who created the mosaic BLOOM! sign out front, discussed the possibility that they would lose their home. He met with a bankruptcy lawyer.

“It was a bit of a wakeup call because both of them are already heavily invested, and the financials didn’t look good,” he said. “That was pretty scary.”

But the bankruptcy lawyer said the business would make it through the year. He met with a financial adviser to come up with solutions. They stopped buying material, other than tiny loads of summer perennials and fall mums, which each were less than $2,000. He negotiated with vendors to start paying what they owed.

“That’s been a heartening process," Pelletier said. "They understand that this is a seasonal business, and it’s our first year.”

Learning from the past
Pelletier says the mistakes of this year are unrepeatable, and they’re common for new small businesses. They’ve learned from them.

First, they don’t need to pour money into renovating the space again, which primarily went to updating the 2,400-square-foot barn that dates back to the 19th century. A portion of the barn is dedicated to a boutique-like garden center, which showcases vintage and modern garden art, water features, whimsical gnomes, plants and other pieces on rustic, wooden shelves and displays. Natural light and soft glowing lamps illuminate the space. A short staircase left of the entrance leads to an art gallery, with the high barn ceiling exposed, where local artists’ work is exhibited.

Beyond the art gallery are the Elemental Design offices, the landscape design and install business that Pelletier started while he was a partner at Lotus Gardenscapes in Ann Arbor, Mich. Each office is separated by French-style glass doors and stained glass windows are installed throughout the space. That’s also where Pelletier’s two recue pit bull mixes, Rocky and Fergie, hang out. The Elemental Design group completes 35 to 40 projects a year, and Pelletier predicts total sales will be about $800,000.

“The place was a mess and it was winter so the stuff we could work on was inside. We made really nice offices and an interior space to make the shop look great, and pushed a little bit outside,” Pelletier says. “In retrospect, I was really carried away with that. I could have also done really little in here and we would have had bare bones offices. In any case, the money would have been better spent outside in the nursery, on the inventory and on the external part that would have generated money.”

He expects the nursery portion, which will close mid-October and reopen in spring, will pull in about $150,000.

What was most “sobering,” he says, is that the former nursery business that occupied the space, which was only open three months out of the year pulled in about $110,000 without the marketing Pelletier invested in.

“I wanted [customers] to know this is a completely different store, a full-service landscape place,” he says. “It’s not what it was."

The second mistake was that they bought too much inventory, especially in the tree and shrub category. Next year, Pelletier says they’ll have two checks before any orders go through and watch it more closely.

“We should have been buying in groups of 10 and seeing how things go,” Pelletier says. “The retail consultant we worked with said they got good at inventory because they watched it like a hawk."

Stacey Rayer, the nursery manager at BLOOM! who has 30 years of horticultural experience under her belt, says she’ll purchase and focus more on annuals, which were in high demand early.

“People’s money in the beginning of the season goes to annuals. They’re doing their beds and their baskets and doing their vegetable gardens,” Rayer says. “We could have used way more. The problem was we had vegetables and annuals that got killed by frost. We brought in way too many trees early and too many really tender products too early.”

The final unrepeatable mistake — underestimating the complexity of setting up and managing the POS system.

“We did not have that in the beginning, and it really took a lot of time, energy and money to get that up to speed, and we needed it quickly,” Rayer says. “You have to have that infrastructure.”

Plans for next spring
While Rayer freely admits the blunders of the 2013 season, she emphasizes the strengths of the nursery — especially the fact that BLOOM! focuses on customer service and education.

“I love introducing people to new varieties and teaching them how to be very successful with growing them,” says Rayer, whose passion for plants comes through her voice. “I like to ask a few more questions as to what that client is willing to do for that landscape. It really comes down to customer service and giving great advice, and being told the truth about plant material and what’s realistic. People are used to just buying something because it’s pretty.”

Rayer, an agronomist who was most recently was operations manager at another nursery in the area, says the popularity of “whimsical, kitschy, lower-priced garden art” surprised her most this season.

BLOOM! focused on the higher-end, artist-produced works this year, but will shift focus when they open again in 2014. And they’ll tap into the ever popular fairy gardening and terrarium markets.

“We’ll offer workshops, products, planters, great mini plants and all of the fun, decorative items,” Rayer says. “That was something we weren’t prepared for.”

Another focus will be water gardening, says Pelletier. They already offer water features, plants, fish and accessories, but they’ll highlight it more by moving it to the front of the store and including it in promotional materials.

“There’s really no good water gardening store in the Ann Arbor area. They’re all far away,” he says, counting off about seven other green businesses nearby. “So we should be able to really dominate that market if we can get the word out.”

BLOOM! offered free Saturday morning workshops this year on fruit tree care, waterscaping, creating succulent planters and kids art classes where they worked with natural materials, Rayer says. Usually six to eight people would show up, but she hopes with more marketing, they’ll be able to attract more customers.

One of the challenges for BLOOM! is getting noticed. The barn and nursery are about a mile from the quaint, charming downtown Dexter area, but the road has a 50 mph speed limit, and Pelletier wonders if people have time to read their signs.

“We’re in the section where there’s not really anything in it. It’s the conduit to the highway,” Pelletier says. “We’re going to see if the township will let us put a second entrance in so we have a drive-through.” They also plan to add flowering plants to bring color to the space where there are currently shrubs and trees, and perhaps install a lit sign.

An artist’s passion
Pelletier, who grew up in Cape Cod, worked alongside his dad, who owned a company that planted the dunes to help control erosion and built staircases over the sandy hills.

But his first passion is art — something he’s been able to incorporate into his landscape design business. A few years ago he created “Elemental Totems” — striking, narrow 8- to 12-foot tall pipes with cutouts of various shapes that are illuminated, which he sells at BLOOM! He installed several during a landscaping project in 2012, and explains his inspiration.

“While working on Treeform for the City of Ann Arbor in 2010, I was using a plasma cutter to cut and re-weld salvaged pipe into slightly tapered columns for the ‘trunks’ of the sculptures. I had an extra pipe and started to cut shapes out of it, leaving a negative space that would create both shadow play and form images against the back wall of the pipe,” he wrote on his website, http://bloom-gardens.com/wordpress/?p=2893.

When we met, he was wearing a short-sleeved, yellow plaid button up that revealed fresh scratches on his arm from installing featherock the day before for his piece that’s displayed at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Some of his designs were also showcased in the art gallery portion of his shop, but, Pelletier laments, “The art gallery generated nothing. People know it as a nursery.” Next season, in addition to art, the space will house workshops and gift items at lower price points.

Once the garden center closes mid-October, Pelletier will focus on Elemental Design, which he hopes will help float BLOOM! through the winter. Though it’s been a tough season, a few moments have given him hope. In August, actual sales exceeded the estimated number by 30 percent. He and the staff have evaluated their business and have plans to improve next year.

Pelletier said since the first article about BLOOM! ran in Garden Center’s August issue, he’s received feedback and support from other independent garden center owners. Shelly McKinney, who owns Elbow Creek Garden & Gift in Florida, sent him an email telling a story that mirrors his. She also has a passion for locally produced, organic products. She created a beautiful, boutique-like garden center, too. She struggled the first year.

“Like you, everything just seemed to fall into place at the beginning. I, too, had no retail experience and just winged my POS, and it was a nightmare for the first six months,” McKinney wrote. “I almost closed once because I ran out of capital ... It’s taken almost three years for my business to be a cut above the rest. I just wanted to tell you to not give up. I saw your website and you have an awesome business. Best of luck and keep the faith! ”

And Pelletier says he won't give up.

“We definitely have a better vision for next year. We know what people have bought. We have a target now,” he says. “It was grim, but it looks like we have a clear path through. As long as we run things tighter, we'll be OK.”