Boost your bulb sales

The bulb category is a highly diverse and versatile one for garden centers and home gardeners. The key to selling more bulbs is to make sure you’re maximizing your marketing opportunities and selling strategies year-round. How you stock and market your bulbs will greatly impact when, how many and how quickly they sell. (For simplicity’s sake, in this article we’ll use the term “bulb” to encompass all true bulbs, rhizomes, tubers and corms.)
 

Pre-sell

Speeding up inventory turns and improving cash flow is always a top priority for independent garden centers. So how do you do that with bulbs? Essentially, bulbs are a hard good line that gives you much more flexibility in terms of when you buy them and how you maintain them in the store. You’re probably already pre-booking most — if not all — of your bulbs. So why not pre-sell them to your customer?

Pre-selling inventory is a great way to get cash into the register long before you receive the product or have to pay for it. Pre-selling will take a bit of organization and accounting adjustments on your part, but it’s well worth the effort. Pre-selling product also gets customers back into the store for extra visits when they come to pick up their orders. Most POS systems will enable you to set up work orders and paid pick-ups for such pre-orders.

The time to pre-sell certain bulb varieties is ideally when those varieties are blooming in the garden. For example, pre-sell tulip bulbs when they’re blooming in spring. That way they are present in your customers’ minds and they are thinking about which colors they wish they had blooming in their gardens. You can build pre-order availabilities for your customers as soon as you get availabilities from your vendors. Put together a nice booklet of visuals, much like a catalog, for customers to shop from (and put it on your website). Set a cut off for your pre-orders and submit them with your regular booking. You’ll then need to have a plan for pulling those special orders once inventory arrives and contacting customers to let them know it’s time to pick up.

To create demand and urgency, consider creating a special group of varieties that are only available through pre-order and won’t be available at the time the bulbs are stocked in-store. If your vendor has limited quantities or special mixes available, these are perfect “pre-order only” options. Special pre-order opportunities could also be exclusively offered to your loyalty/rewards plan customers.
 

Gardening is local

Depending on where you operate, the types of bulbs you sell during any given season, or when those bulbs typically bloom, will differ. While tulips are perennials in colder climates, they’re annuals in the South and must be vernalized and replanted in late fall each year. Conversely, summer-blooming bulbs such as crinum lilies are tough perennials in the South, but won’t make it through winters in the North.

Of course, you must customize your bulb selection to best fit your local climate. However, don’t underestimate your customers’ desire or willingness to plant outside of their hardiness zone. Southerners who love tulips are willing to pay for and plant new pre-chilled tulips every year. Northerners may be perfectly happy to drop potted crinums into the summer garden. Consider teaching your customers how to use bulbs that are not typically cold or heat hardy in your area.
 

Mix it easy

Not all bulb buyers want to spend a lot of time coming up with the perfect color or variety combination. So why not do it for them? By creating custom mixes of grab-and-go bulbs, you’ll not only have something your competitors don’t, but you’ll also make buying easier and faster for your customer. Work with your local bulb distributor to pre-mix special combos for you and then market them with unique names and custom tags (see photo).
 

Perennial performance

If a bulb is also a perennial in your area, be sure to sell it as a perennial, not just a “bulb.” Customers are looking for low-maintenance plants that will both perennialize and naturalize in their gardens. Bulbs that “perennialize” will return each year from the original bulb you planted. Bulbs that are said to “naturalize” will not only return each year, but also reproduce and spread without assistance. Customers don’t always think of bulbs when they come in asking for perennials; mostly because garden centers don’t always do a good job of presenting bulbs as perennials.
 

Water-wise

In many parts of the country, water-wise plant selections are no longer optional, they’re mandatory. Some of the most water-wise garden plants happen to be bulbs. Bearded iris are staples in hot and dry climates. Crinum lilies will dig themselves in deep and bloom heavy in the most compacted and hot soils. Surprise lilies (Lycoris squamigera) will begin showing off their beautiful blooms just as temperatures are soaring above 105 degrees with no rain in sight. Just as with any category, trends come and go. Keep a keen focus on current trends with bulbs. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that water-wise alliums are enjoying an upswing in popularity. They’re perfect for layering in the loose and less-formal perennial gardens that are becoming more popular. Make sure your bookings adjust for such opportunities.
 

Sell success

One of the best ways to ensure your customer has a fantastic flowering bulb display is to sell them enough bulbs to put on a good show. Too often, customers don’t buy enough bulbs for the space they’re planting, and we’re too afraid to push more on them. The result is often a less-than-impressive display come bloom season. Lack of success may mean that customers won’t be back to buy bulbs the next time around.

When it comes to most of the more popular spring blooming bulbs, customers commonly plant only a fraction of what they’d need for a great display. Be sure to provide specific spacing and quantity recommendations so customers know how many bulbs they really need for their given space. Remember that when you’re mixing more than one variety together, or varieties that bloom at different times, spacing should be closer and quantities larger. Offer pricing incentives for larger volumes of bulk bulb purchases.

Pre-sales, bulk custom mixes, creative merchandising and faster turns will help you maximize sales and cut down on margin erosion in your bulb category. And despite some seasonality, bulbs can offer up potential sales year-round if you combine in-store inventory, pre-sales and online shopping opportunities.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, digital content marketing, branding design, advertising and social media support for green industry companies.  www.lesliehalleck.com