Meet Ontario grower-retailer and 2025 Top 100 Independent Garden Center Vandermeer Nursery

For as long as she can remember, traditional plant tags frustrated Saskia Kersten. Year after year, Vandermeer Nursery incurred losses when customers removed tags, rendering some plants unidentifiable and unsellable.

Then about three years ago, Kersten, Vandermeer’s retail manager, observed a shift among local suppliers and competitors toward using stickers instead of traditional tags on plants. The stickers’ non-removable nature presented a compelling solution, offering opportunities for customization and unprecedented data collection. Kersten realized it was time to invest in a new labeling system.

Vandermeer Nursery, No. 49 on our sister publication Garden Center magazine’s 2025 Top 100 Independent Garden Centers List, is a retail grower based in Ajax, Ontario, situated approximately 40 minutes east of Toronto. The nursery caters to a diverse demographic, encompassing both long-standing customers who have frequented the establishment for decades and a significant population of novice gardeners.

Adrian Vandermeer founded the operation in 1953, creating a nursery renowned for its expansive size and diverse plant selection that Kersten says consistently draws customers. Spanning around 38 acres, Vandermeer’s footprint seamlessly integrates both cultivation and retail operations. The space includes 200,000 square feet of greenhouse facilities. The retail sector boasts 120,000 square feet of greenhouse and features an additional 80,000 square feet of outdoor retail yard space.

The grower prides itself on being an “A to Z” nursery, offering an extensive array of annuals, perennials, roses, trees, shrubs, carnivorous plants, houseplants and water plants. Beyond flora, the nursery features a dedicated pond department, where staff breed and sell koi. Additionally, a small cafe, a separate business, operates on-site, contributing to the nursery’s appeal and drawing in visitors over the past two years.

Why create new labels?

In addition to addressing plant waste, Vandermeer pursued new labeling technology and brought that function in-house to resolve long-standing issues of inconsistent and inaccurate plant information.

“Tags from other companies can be great, but often, they’re trying to provide you information that’s going to be accurate everywhere,” Kersten says. “So, let’s say that the company is based in the U.S. Once you get further north, some of that information isn’t necessarily relevant anymore.”

For instance, plants like purple fountain grass, a perennial in warmer southern regions, would arrive with perennial tags despite being an annual in Vandermeer’s northern climate zone, leading to customer frustration, Kersten says. Furthermore, varied approaches by different vendors over the years contributed to a lack of standardized information, making accurate communication challenging.

Vandermeer’s upgrade two-and-a-half years ago to the NCR Counterpoint POS system, which replaced its outdated 25-year-old system, spurred this transition. This modernization provided capabilities such as faster checkout lines and enhanced reporting, paving the way for improved signage and barcoding.

The desire for customization drove a key initiative, especially given Vandermeer’s extensive plant variety and the need for accurate and consistent information across all signage. The goal was to ensure that stickers, in-store signs and, eventually, its website all conveyed the same precise details.

From Cultivate to stickers on plant pots

The journey to implementing this new labeling system began two years ago at Cultivate. Kersten says the IGC selected a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based company after a thorough vetting at the show.

“I kept going back to their booth with questions: ‘How does this work? How does that work? Can I do this?’” she explains.

According to Kersten, the first-year phase involved purchasing the printer and software to enable in-house barcode printing. The following year, the business invested in a label applicator, an automated component integrated into the production line.

The transition to in-house printing was a significant leap of faith. Vandermeer relied on her supplier’s recommendations for the printer and software, with Kersten personally designing the sticker layout.

The initial implementation required hand-labeling pots that previously required expensive custom tags or older hand-applied stickers. In 2025, Vandermeer expanded the new labeling system to additional departments, with plans to scale up in 2026. In February, the IGC also added an automated machine to apply the labels directly to the pots.

Vandermeer has substantially increased its use of sticker labels. Kersten estimates that Vandermeer used approximately 25,000 labels in the first year, increasing to around 200,000 in 2025 and projecting a total of roughly 350,000 labels for the upcoming year.

“We’re still very much in the early stages of this process,” she says. “But it is working fairly effectively.”

While Vandermeer has significantly automated its labeling process, it still faces certain exceptions and challenges. For example, Vandermeer still hand-labels larger planters and all products sourced from other suppliers within the retail store. However, nearly all of its in-house finished products, excluding sell packs, now benefit from machine application.

Digging into the data

The new labeling system serves other strategic objectives for Vandermeer Nursery, primarily by providing unprecedented access to sales data. According to Kersten, the business can now determine sell-out dates for specific products and pinpoint items that remained unsold until sales events began. Staff can also more accurately gauge top-selling plant varieties. This granular information enables the IGC to modify future orders and optimize the varieties it carries strategically.

Furthermore, the ability to differentiate pricing has been a significant advantage. Previously, Vandermeer standardized pricing by department and pot size, Kersten explains. For instance, all quart perennials were uniformly priced at $6.99. Now, Vandermeer can adjust prices based on individual plant costs, which allows it to monitor sales pace, assess whether pricing is too high and ultimately make better-informed decisions about product offerings.

“This gives us the opportunity to modify our pricing to more individual varieties or individual characteristics, as opposed to standardizing,” she says. “And it allows us to individually barcode so we can record our sales tracking as well and use that for next year’s ordering to make sure that we’re ordering appropriately and reducing our losses.”

This collected data also prepares Vandermeer for potential online sales with individual SKUs and enhanced inventory management. While the decision to sell plant material online is not yet final, the current system lays crucial groundwork, Kersten says.

Sticker design also formed part of a broader branding effort for Vandermeer, which Kersten says the IGC wanted to bring in-house.

“We had various people working on our signs over the years, and we found that different people were filling in different information in different ways,” she says. “It was just getting a little bit too out of hand.”

It’s all for the customer

In addition, Vandermeer has modified its pot and tray styles in response to the new labeling system, which effectively reduces the use of odd or inefficient sizes that were problematic for sticker applications.

“We used to use different color pots to signify shade versus sun,” Kersten says. “Now, there’s a yellow bar at the top (of the sticker). So, rather than maintaining two or three colors (of pots), we have one color pot, and we modify the sticker instead.”

According to Kersten, adding icons to the sticker design has also helped address customer needs. For example, a bee signifies a pollinator-friendly plant, and a maple leaf indicates it is a native plant.

“On our houseplants, we use a paw print for pet-friendly,” she adds. “We don’t group our pet-friendly plants together in the greenhouse. We used to spend a lot of time directing (customers) around the store. Now, it’s a three-second conversation where we point out what they should be looking for. So, that’s helped act as a silent salesperson.”

During the design phase, Kersten says she needed to step outside of her plant pro persona to evaluate whether the stickers met customer needs objectively.

“I would take my iteration and go to senior staff and ask, ‘Do you think I have everything? Have I captured everything the customer needs to know?’” she says. “And then I would take it to a new cashier who has no gardening experience and say, ‘Do you think you could take care of this plant? What do you have questions about? What do you not understand?’

“I wanted honest feedback outside of just what I thought (was important),” Kersten adds. “So, I had to reassure my inexperienced staff that there were no wrong answers and that they weren’t going to get in trouble.”

While she’s satisfied with the stickers’ overall design and functionality, Kersten admits she still adds some tweaks from time to time. While Vandermeer’s investment has generated a substantial return on investment, its impact on customers is perhaps the most critical litmus test for success.

“I host the tours of the production greenhouse, and I always made sure we pointed at the new labeler this spring,” Kersten says. “And we’ve heard quite a few positive comments from customers.

“One of the reasons we wanted to do this was customer success,” she adds. “If we give them the right information, their plants tend to thrive a little bit better. If they thrive better, then the customer wants to keep gardening. So, when (customers) hear that our motive (for the new labeling) was to make sure that they’re happy, then we earn a lot of customer loyalty that way.”

Mike Zawacki is a Cleveland-based journalist and frequent contributor to the GIE Media Horticulture Group.