Garden Center Summer - 2007

The OFA Short Course begins the summer trade show season. Always well attended by growers and retailers, it has become a must-attend event. This year saw the birth of a new show: The Independent Garden Center Show in Chicago was held in August. Many independents garden center operators were at the show looking for things to put in their centers. For sure, this show will grow, though hopefully not so fast that exhibitors are drastically increased for the benefit of the show owners while the number of buyers does not proportionally increase.
I wasn't able to attend many of the education sessions, but I did see the color trends put on by the people who own Pantone. My one complaint was that there were so many colors and pallets selected as “trends” that it seemed pretty useless to me. In my opinion, there are very few “bad” colors, only bad combinations of colors. Clean, clear colors, including black and white, are always “in style.”
September brought the Retail Experience conference, put on by Green Profit magazine, in downtown Cleveland. Retail Experience is much more of a pure-education conference with a mini trade show. Split sessions made for very difficult choices. Part of the conference included two days of touring local garden centers: one day on the east side and the next on the west side, three each day. I've never done one of these arranged garden center tours, so it was wonderful for me. Each garden center was completely different from the others, and all were real destinations where you could spend a chunk of a day. All of the operators were beyond generous in opening their operations and sharing their knowledge with the group.
Our last stop was the Petitti Home and Garden Center, one of eight operated by the Petitti family. This was their flagship store, which backed up on a freeway and wow, what a place. Although there were many very interesting areas of the garden center, the one that took me aback was the free-standing display of the most beautifully decorated cookies. It took a while to realize (and even longer to accept) that these were gourmet doggie biscuits for sale. One of the tour guests asked A. J. Petitti what kind of shelf life the biscuits have to which he replied, “I’m not sure since we have to restock a couple times a week anyway.” I've lost sleep over this experience.
One of the educational sessions featured Andy Buyting, the owner of Green Village Home and Garden, who talked on market planning and pricing to compete effectively with the big boxes. Andy also had a book to promote called The Retailer's Roadmap to Success.
Not long ago, I was invited to a Florida Chamber of Commerce session titled "Imagining an Innovative Economy.” The session had lots of high-level business and institutional representatives. They had hired a brilliant third-party consultant from IBM to conduct and moderate the session. During his presentation, he shared the experience of working at IBM during a difficult transition when the company had to change and had no money. He spoke of the three boxes that we live our business lives in: The first box is where we live almost every minute, operating the company to stay in business and on budget. This occupies between 95% and 105% of our time. The third box is where we imagine the future we would like to have, what we would like to be and look like five and ten years down the road. The hardest box to live in, though, is the second box. That is the box that includes the plans and action steps we must take to get to box No. 3.
Andy Buyting wants to franchise the Green Village and Garden Center model, and he decided that the action step for him to take was to write a book sharing his methods with the retail world. I went out and bought the book, despite not being a retailer. After all, isn’t it worth $20 to fast track yourself to mastering the second box like Andy did? For the price of the book and the time invested, you may find yourself well on your way to your third box.