What does it take to outmaneuver and outsmart bigger competitors with deeper pockets? Independent garden centers are discovering it takes a combination of innovative products and services along with offbeat events.
Savvy center managers are offering everything from phone apps and concierge programs to garden shows and farm dinners to differentiate themselves from big box stores and other vendors.
"Anyone can sell a customer a plant, but not everyone can teach their customer how to be a successful gardener," explains Chris Cordrey, the co-owner of East Coast Garden Center in Millsboro, Delaware. The retailer hosts a radio program and makes available a variety of gardening classes.
In addition, East Coast turned its garden center into an event center, offering exercise, cooking, beer- and wine-tasting classes and murder-mystery dinners. They also host speaking engagements by such celebrities as a former NASA engineer, recalling his work on the Apollo space program.
Other garden centers provide services that larger competitors don't, or can't. Stonegate Gardens in Lincoln, Massachusetts. offers a concierge program that includes "caring for a client's property from pottery to garden maintenance to home decorating for the holidays."
Moana Nursery in Reno, Nevada, offers its customers carryout services as well as delivery, and customized planting consulting and designing services.
When you're looking for a plant or product that Harvey's Farm and Garden Center (Westborough, Massachusetts) doesn't carry, your information goes into a customer request binder and you're notified when it's available.
Several centers rely on social media to create buzz and business. The Good Earth Garden Center In Little Rock, Arkansas, gets out the good word on Google Plus, Pinterest, Vine and Instagram, as well as Facebook and Twitter. That's in addition to the Facebook Fan of the Week contest that it started a while back.
White Oak Gardens in Cincinnati was the first garden center in its area to offer phone apps to distribute information about products and sales.
Sharing their expertise is a service and a strategy that several centers use to stand out in their local marketplace.
Ken Matthews Garden Center, which calls itself the "only purely home landscape-oriented garden center in Tidewater, Virginia," teaches classes on topics ranging from textures to colors to low-maintenance gardens.
Many garden center managers speak and distribute coupons at area garden clubs, while others present weekly features on local TV stations and still others produce how-to YouTube videos.
Sometimes it's the onsite attractions that differentiate the shopping experience at independent garden centers. Those attractions have included a master wood worker, creating everything from pergolas to planter boxes at Heights Plant Farm in Houston, the solar farm at Harvey's, and the donkeys, goats and chickens at The Natural Gardener in Austin, Texas.
The Natural Gardener also attracted attention by mircobrewing at least 50 gallons of compost tea weekly, and marketing the fact that it was "the only nursery to check with a microscope to detect any microbial activity."
Creativity and ingenuity go a long way toward helping independent garden centers compete with and beat the big box stores.
