Selling plants— because life should be beautiful

Because life should be beautiful,” is the slogan the staff at Orchard Nursery & Florist in Lafayette, Calif., lives by. The garden center is a destination for both plant lovers and customers seeking unique gifts at the business’s Lazy K Gift house. Kathy Courtright represents the second generation of Courtrights working at the business, which was established in 1946. Her role at the garden center has evolved over time.

“I started at the nursery nine years ago as a cashier,” Courtright said. “Shortly after that, I filled in as a buyer for an employee that was on extended medical leave. I picked up responsibilities here and there over time.
“My role now involves a little of everything: human resources, garden shop management, coordinating the e-mail newsletter, supervising various hard-goods buyers and being the general “fire putter-outer.” The rest of the job goes without saying—customer service, cleaning up, etc.”

GARDEN CENTER MAGAZINE: What’s your favorite task or project at work?
KATHY COURTRIGHT: My favorite time is when I'm working at the cash registers. It’s fun to see which plants people have picked out and hear what they are doing in their gardens. I enjoy seeing customers be excited about their gardens and swapping stories with them.

GCM: What’s your least favorite?
KC: My least favorite task is firing and laying people off. Along the same lines of least favorite, is having to discipline employees for things when I know they know better.

GCM: How much crossover is there between gift customers and garden customers? Do you find you’re catering to two different crowds? Or are they generally the same?
KC: We see both scenarios. We definitely have some crossover between the nursery and gift house customers, but there are also the almost-exclusively Lazy K customers and the diehard nursery customers, so I guess three different crowds. We try to use it to our benefit. If we have an item that isn’t moving in the Garden Shop, we’ll try to move it to Lazy K, and oftentimes it sells from there, and vice versa.

GCM: Do locals make up most of your customer base? Or do you tend to draw in people from outside the immediate area?
KC: If you consider “local” to be a 10-mile radius, I would estimate that locals make up less that 50 percent of our business. We are in a heavily populated area, and we have over 60 ZIP codes in our delivery area, so it depends how you define local. But we definitely draw outside the immediate area. Our Christmas Shop brings in customers from the farthest outside areas.

GCM: What has been most popular at your store this year? Why is it so appealing?
KC: Vegetables and edibles—fruit trees, berries, herbs, organic fertilizers and solutions, organic mulches and potting soils and vegetable seeds. They’re appealing because of the media attention these items have been getting—the garden at the White House, the “Grow your Own” movement, the trend toward knowing what you’re eating and the green movement have all played a role.

GCM: What would you say is an emerging category at your store, something you see growing over the next few years?
KC: Again, edibles—citrus and other fruit trees, herbs, vegetables berries. And to go along with that, organic fertilizers and solutions are growing at a fast pace for us. Three of the top 10 greenest cities in the United States for 2009 are within 30 miles of us. Naturally, organics and sustainability are growing in importance in our area.
For our gift shop, an emerging category is apparel. It started as scarves, hats and purses, and grew into outerwear and other women’s apparel.

GCM: What qualities do you think employees need to succeed in the garden-center business?
KC: Flexibility and a willingness to help where needed. In the nursery business, many of us all “do it all,” and that’s the way it has to be in a seasonal business. To be employed year-round, what we all do has to change over the course of the year because what’s happening at the nursery is changing too.

GCM: Orchard Nursery produces both a print and e-mail newsletter. Why both?
KC: We’ve produced a print newsletter for many years. It used to go out 10 times a year; we’ve shrunk that down to six to eight. The e-mail newsletter goes out weekly, every Thursday. The e-news has garden articles just like the print newsletter, but it also has more timely information. We found that it can be hard to know what you want to tell your customer four weeks in advance, which is the timeline for the paper newsletter. For the e-news, it’s weekly, so sales, promotions, “just arrived” items, weather-related garden tips, and last-minute info is easier to get through to the customer.

GCM: Do you think you’ll ever go online only?
KC: We still have customers that like to have a print newsletter, something that they can hold. The count for our e-mail newsletter is increasing, and our print newsletter has downsized considerably in the last few years. I think we just need to keep listening to what our customers want. The whole point of the newsletter is to communicate with our customers, so whichever means is getting through to them is what we should do.