Smile for the Camera

There’s nothing like having a real-life reindeer and a former employee who looks like Santa Claus in your garden center to generate buzz. At least that’s what Waterloo Gardens in Exton, Pa., discovered many years ago.

The former employee’s beard isn’t one of those flimsy fakes you can yank off. In fact, he’s quite popular around town and really gets into his role. The reindeer? It was introduced roughly eight years ago, according to Kristie Beers, assistant marketing director for Waterloo Gardens. The result is a line of people out the door waiting to snap a picture with Santa and his hoofed friend, and the kind of invaluable exposure that any business would die for.

Bring your best friends, too!
The event is so popular that Waterloo Gardens decided to allow customers’ animal friends to get their picture taken with Santa, too. They’ve designated one night this December as “pet night,” an event that in years past has even seen snakes arriving with their owners to curl up with jolly old St. Nick. As far as humans go, they can come in Nov. 24-25 and every weekend in December this year for the two-hour break Santa takes from his North Pole workshop.

Cultivate community relationships
The goal behind the events, which Beers guesses cost Waterloo Gardens roughly $2,000 to host (including three Cookies with Santa events and an Easter egg hunt), isn’t to make money but rather to show their community involvement.

“We do incentivize people to come back sometimes with coupons, but it’s really for our customers’ enjoyment,” Beers says. “Our Santa has quite a following around here. Plus, there have been children who have been getting their pictures taken here for years. It’s quite a tradition, and it’s a nice draw for us.”

At Waterloo Gardens, guests take their own pictures with their digital cameras or cellphones that they’re told to bring. The store simply provides the greenhouse space and some staff to make sure Santa doesn’t get dehydrated and that the lines move along smoothly. A sign that instructs people to make sure their jackets are off and their cameras are ready helps the line move a little more quickly.

At a new fall/Halloween-themed event this year, Waterloo Gardens provided cut-out boards that kids could stand behind and put their faces in for a photo opportunity. For the Santa event, a sleigh with the Waterloo Gardens name on it provides additional exposure for the store.

Get the word out
Beers promotes the events via Waterloo Gardens’s enewsletter, in-store signage, website, Facebook pageand a press release sent to local newspapers and magazines. The Cookies with Santa event doesn’t even need promotion; Beers says they hold three of those a year, and the 25 slots available for each fill up easily. Still, the most popular event is the reindeer one Beers says.

A new twist this year was bringing in Santa for Christmas in July. He wore a red Hawaiian shirt, red sneakers and a straw hat – vacation attire for a man in need of rest and relaxation. “The families who came to take pictures with him dressed in tropical clothes, too,” Beers says.

Beers’ advice to other garden centers looking to hold a similar photo event with Santa? Find one who likes his job.

“Have a Santa who enjoys children, and pets for that matter, if you’re doing a pet event,” she says. “The more you have someone who is genuine, the better.”

Call in the pros
Pasquesi Home and Gardens in Chicago has also found photography events to be a great marketing tool and a good showing of community support, but they do them slightly different than Waterloo Gardens in that they have a professional photographer on site. In fact, it was the photographer’s idea to start holding such events.

“Four years ago, a photographer we knew locally approached us,” says marketing director Lisa Pasquesi. “She had taken pictures of people for our Fall Fest in the past. We ended up giving her space in our coffee bar area to start staging events, where she offered a discounted sitting fee courtesy of us along with her normal photo packages.”

Since the photographer had a side business in pet photography, that was the exclusive focus of the events initially. But due to the enormous success of the events, Pasquesi is now testing out people events.

“The pet photo events, which we typically have around the end of October into November, have been good for us because people like having the pictures for their Christmas cards,” Pasquesi says. “So we thought, ‘why don’t we see if there’s a market for families, too, so we’re not leaving out people who don’t have pets?’”
 

Reap the benefits
Pasquesi views the events as a win-win for both the garden center and the photographer. All of the money goes to the photographer, but the events pay off by bringing lots of people into the store who come back year after year.

Pasquesi holds the events at both of her stores and has had to add more weekends to the schedule. This year, she has added two weekends at each store: one for families and one three-day weekend for pets.

Other than closing down the coffee bar and helping out with the initial set-up, there is no other commitment for the garden center staff– the photographer does it all. Even though the events get plenty of promotion through flyers handed out at registers, an email blast, website and Facebook posts (Pasquesi paid an additional fee this year to make the event show up in followers’ newsfeeds more often), the events themselves serve as promotion, too.

“Customers see what’s going on and definitely wonder what’s up,” Pasquesi says. “Sometimes, there might be time slots that open up and people ask if they can grab that time slot and come back.”

Having a local photographer who took the initiative herself to start the events has been a blessing for the store.

“It has been very easy for us,” says Pasquesi. “It is nothing that inconveniences our staff or customers. It’s a great way to get that word-of-mouth advertising. This year, with one of our event weekends being close to Halloween, I suspect people will come in with their pets and kids in costumes!”
 

Jason Stahl is a freelance writer in Cleveland, and regular contributor to Garden Center magazine.