Break Into Live Goods With Intentionality and Purpose

When we opened our first larger home center 22 years ago, we decided to jump into the live goods business. We had never been in the garden center business before, so it was all new to us. Needless to say, we made plenty of mistakes out of ignorance and a lack of experience in those early years.

Hopefully, some of our newbie shortcomings can help your operation. Live goods are one of the categories you can easily outshine the box stores and do so at high margins. The garden center business is all about volume, care, simplicity and presentation.

Volume

First, you will need to make some decisions on the scope and extent of your live goods business. Keep in mind, color sells, builds sales volume and comes with high margins. Consider focusing on high-quality items and specific categories that will set you apart. For instance, offering quantity break discounts for categories like 4.5-inch premium annuals is a proven winning strategy to drive movement, volume and margin. Some level of quantity will also help you look like you’re in the business, give your customers options and help absorb inevitable product losses. You’ll need to learn what growers are good at, their order minimums, shipping and other add-on costs, reliability, quality and pricing. Finding and building a relationship with a reliable local grower is also very important.

Care

Knowing the product in terms of sun versus shade display and relative need for water is critical. Cultivating a plant nerd on your team will serve your business very well. Product movement is also critical to keep things fresh, new and exciting. The good growers will be shipping you retail-ready products, but they will need to find a home out of the grower containers and a caretaker relatively quickly.

Simplicity & Presentation

Keeping things simple and emphasizing merchandising are perhaps the two most important business strategies to consider. In our industry, the temptation is to track SKUs at the microlevel, but this does not work well with live goods. Condense your pricing categories as much as possible. Keep it simple in terms of purchase decisions, handling, merchandising and checkout processes.

Offer clearly marked water and weatherproof signage and vertically stripe display categories to increase exposure and avoid confusion. Train your people well on the basics: sun and shade, watering and pricing categories. Finally, focus on color at the front of your garden center and at high-visibility locations near your building entrances. Full color can both promote high impulse purchases and send a clear message that you are serious about the flower business.

Don’t expect perfection. It will take you some time to figure out the uniqueness of live goods. Sales volume covers ordering mistakes, trend changes and plants that happen to not perform as well as others. Keep things simple, know your product, know your vendors and make it about what the customer wants. Selling flowers is a very rewarding and joyful business, as customers will literally sing your praises when you do it well.

Happy selling—go get it!