Tap into local charm

Three years ago, my sister Summer came home from a shopping trip to the now-shuttered Home Depot Landscape Supply and bubbled over with excitement about a couple of species geraniums she had picked up. “You wouldn’t believe how gorgeous all the plants on that table were,” she told me.

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A week later, she made another trip and brought home a few more plants. On this trip she noticed the sign on the table that said all the plants she was in love with came from a single, local grower called Steve’s Leaves.

“Can’t you set up a fake story so you’ll have an excuse to take me on a tour of Steve’s Leaves?” she wheedled.

When the table was wiped clean save for a stray leaf or two on her next trip, she was outraged. She quickly hunted up an employee to find out when the grower delivered. From that point, she hit the store only on Tuesdays so she would have first pick.

The day she arrived at the same time as the grower’s truck, I had to listen to her recount the story a few times. The grower delivered plants in a pickup, which charmed Summer since it underlined that this was a small, local grower. Treasure among the masses.

Summer wasn’t the only one to fall in love with Steve’s Leaves. The grower’s popularity was strong enough to provoke a big profile on owner Steve Rosenbaum in The Dallas Morning News last year.

Use local charm in your store

I was amused by Summer’s enthusiasm, dismayed that a mass merchant sparked it and struck by the manager’s brilliance in promoting local growers.

My sister’s grower love affair occurred prior to the big “buy local” trend. She wasn’t thinking of global warming when she was charmed by a favorite grower being a local one.

I think why being local was important was the sense of community. Since the grower was local, there was a chance she could meet someone who worked there at the grocery store or mall. It was a neighbor. The fact that the owner put his first name in the company name made her feel like she knew Steve of Steve’s Leaves. She certainly knew that he loved foliage plants and was a stickler for quality.

Today, a local supplier has added appeal of fitting in with the sustainability tenet to buy products created or grown within a 150-mile radius.

It’s a simple and powerful marketing tool to highlight the local appeal of products. If a Home Depot manager could make it work, surely an independent garden center can do it better.

Every green-goods buyer I know has a favorite local grower who stands out above the rest. That grower would be a natural to promote.

Start small with a designated table in a high-traffic area for each plant department. Select plants from your best grower and put a sign on the table that identifies the greenhouse or nursery’s manager or owner by name: “Grown by John Smith, NearbyTown.”

If you want to jump into this promotion scheme in a bigger way, keep that eye-catching table and add signs throughout the store to identify plants that were locally grown. A Garden Center Magazine survey that will be published next month shows that most plants in a garden center are locally grown, so you should be able to blanket your store with these types of signs. High-end grocery stores do this regularly.

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Who knows, if you make your grower a celebrity, he or she may start offering better terms.

- Carol Miller

July 2008