I was born into the independent garden center biz, and I have seen my share of the generational ebb and flow. In the past 10 years, a demographic shift, a Great Recession (which hit you differently depending on what part of the industry you’re in), and a seismic shift in how we garden (heirloom tomatoes, anyone?) have resulted in a complex business landscape.

Let the good times roll

The mid ’90s to the Great Recession was a peak time for Baby Boomer shoppers. Women in their 50s flooded our stores and, as long as we knew how to sell to them, we prospered.

This was the era when annuals were king, giftware sections and cafes became common in mid to large garden centers and owners looked to bigger and more complex Christmas products to diversify their sales year.

Only the innovative few had shifted seriously to digital marketing. Many of us had websites. A few of us were even experimenting with this strange new website called Facebook. But mass media ruled. I’d like to say that I was in the pioneering vanguard, but I was still lining up half page ads in the local paper when other garden center owners were taking a chance on social media.

Our ad budgets were bloated with newspapers, radio and even TV ads. We sent out mailers and flyers, door hangers and fridge magnets. Boomers read the paper, so we assumed it was all working.

Recession years

Recessions hit every industry differently. During the Great Recession, people canceled their vacations and stayed home instead. “Staycationing” became a huge opportunity for garden centers. At my garden center, 2009 was a record revenue year, not beaten until 2015.

As unemployment surged and money became tight, people began to examine how financially dependent they were on things like fresh produce. Consumers realized that, if worse came to worse, they didn’t have the skills needed to survive without conveniences like grocery stores. So the grow-your-own movement, which began in earnest after 9/11, got fresh fuel.

Where you were, and what kind of garden center you had determined how much you suffered. Big ticket items and high-end landscaping were hit the hardest.

Big advertising budgets turned from wings to anchors. Tighter bottom lines forced innovation, and savvy garden centers started putting their marketing money toward talent like designers, writers, and strategists, rather than media buys.

At the same time, the term “Millennial” began circulating through the air. It was a curious term for teens and 20-somethings. We didn’t really take it seriously.

Recovery and Millennial angst

The past five years have been good to our industry. Canada has had an average annual growth rate of 3.7 percent, according to market research conducted by IBISWorld, and despite massive competition from all sides, garden centers are at the forefront of success when it comes to independents.

But our traditional base is eroding. Baby Boomer women are now mostly in their 60s and older, and are downsizing and buying less. The Xers don’t seem as interested in gardening as their parents were and are a much smaller group.

Millennials (definitions vary, but generally people born between 1980 and 2000) are a massive generation, surpassing Baby Boomers in numbers, with more idealism and less money than ever before. Two generations removed from the customer we’ve spent 30 years adapting to, the rules are changing dramatically.

If you haven’t switched most of your marketing spend to digital, you’re scrambling. A strange world of pay-per-click, SEO, content, social engagement and organic reach awaits you. The learning curve is vertical, but climb it we must.

And here we are. Every year, we’re adapting to a new pace of change, a pace that is the cost of doing business with an increasingly younger customer.

What will our garden centers look like in 5 and 10 years? Those who are successful will be centers of inspiration and education rather than focusing on rows of plants on the bench.

Our in-store experience will match our online experience. Right now, many of us have refined our online presence to adjust to the demographic shift, but the in-store experience takes longer to change. Old habits of display, traffic flow, product selection die hard.

Embracing Millennials isn’t about putting big interactive screens all over your Garden Center. It’s about crafting on in-store and online experience that empowers them to take a chance on growing. How you do that will be different for every garden center, because all of you have a separate business model, brand promise and customer mix.

The thing I know for sure is that, if you want to grow and thrive, you must adapt.

Rob is co-owner of Salisbury Greenhouse, an independent garden center based in Alberta, Canada, and founder of Craft Marketing, a lean digital agency specializing in content marketing for independent businesses. rob@craftmarketing.ca

If there is one thing you can count on in today’s marketplace, it’s change. Fast-paced change. Over the past decade, the way we all do business has changed both dramatically and dichotomously; with consumers shifting heavily to digital ordering and on-demand delivery from mass merchants. However, marketplace disrupters such as Uber have forced large corporations to confront redistribution of their core services and products to smaller companies and individual entrepreneurs. Digital platforms such as Etsy provide a direct-to-consumer retail shop for small businesses across the globe, while digital retail behemoths such as Amazon simultaneously continue to gobble up the brick-and-mortar marketplace share.

Consumers expect all businesses to be marketing experts and excel at representing themselves visually and contextually in relevant ways. They also expect to get all the information they need from you in the palm of their hands, 24/7. Consumers expect a lot that they didn’t previously expect from you.

What has not changed much over the past decade is how independent garden centers do business.

I was asked to share my thoughts in this month’s column on what IGCs need to do to stay ahead of this changing marketplace. From my perspective, it’s not really a matter of getting ahead right now; IGCs still need to figure out how to catch up to consumers before it’s too late.

What I have witnessed happening to IGCs since the Great Recession is a sort of desperate grab to assimilate a whole host of products and promotional tactics that have nothing to do with a garden center experience nor are relevant to our target customers. Anything, it seems, to drive traffic. Anyone who told you that selling bras as a core inventory item was going to save or turn around your garden center business never should have been given stage time in the first place, as far as I’m concerned. And yes, that was a thing.

The problem with trying to sell products and services that are completely and utterly out of the realm of relevancy at your garden center and your local market is that it usually ends up sucking away time, promotional energy, and your marketing budget without necessarily adding corresponding profits to your primary bottom line. Not to mention, it totally confuses your ideal target customers. Identify your core products and strengths as a garden center and invest in them. If those core products and strengths are no longer plants and gardening, then it may be time to pivot your business model. And that’s OK.

There has also been a distinct homogenization of appearance, merchandising and inventory among IGCs. I visit a lot of garden centers, and I admit the visits have really started to feel like déjà vu all over again. When it comes to product, large buying shows do make it easier to get inventory booked and buying duties off your plate. This also means many garden centers will be carrying the exact same product lines, which don’t look all that different from what consumers find at the mass merchants. I think social media has also enabled too many IGCs to copy products and ideas from one another. When it comes to buying and merchandising, it might be time to rely less on big hard good buying shows, industry merchandising workshops, and social media groups. Instead, hire experienced buyers and merchandisers with savvy who can give your business a personal identity and style.

The same goes for your plant selection. If you’re paying attention to consumer plant-related social media trends, then you know more people are looking for unusual plant varieties, funky edibles and indoor collectibles. Specialty is back in. But many consumers are forced to turn to online vendors, instead of IGCs, to fulfill their plant desires.

What has been successful for garden centers over the past 10 years is assimilating associated products and services that are relevant to their retail experience and their target customers. Products and services related to food gardening, community supported agriculture (CSAs), urban livestock, pollinators, conservation and the like. Services like garden design or container installation. Local products from local artisans that help support plant sales, such as pottery and the like. Cafes and coffee service, when well-managed, can also make the retail experience much more enjoyable. Social activities and “wine nights” that bring customers with similar interests together. It all comes down to you doing you … in a way that makes total sense to customers who want to spend money with a garden center.

There are a few silver linings and opportunities lurking in the marketplace right now. If you’re fast enough to recognize them and act, you can thrive. If you haven’t heard, paper books are back in (or still in). New, small book shops are opening because some tangible things just can’t be replaced by digital copies, and instant isn’t always better. This small-retail trend is a good sign for IGCs who capitalize on consumers’ desires for a hands-on experience. As people confront their smartphone addictions, they’ll also be turning back to nature, and the garden, for a helping hand.

In terms of categories, indoor gardening is an area almost completely untapped by most traditional IGCs. Given that most hydro-stores I’m familiar with do a terrible job at retail and customer service, there’s some serious main-stream market opportunity to be had with indoor growers. And I’m not just talking cannabis here; I’m talking about indoor food growers and plant collectors.

Once last piece of advice as you move into the next decade of business: When it comes to marketing, you have my permission to stop obsessing about Millennials. If IGCs spent a fraction of the time they spend trying to figure out Millennials and instead spent it on building on their core strengths as a garden center, paying attention to marketplace trends, innovating with new technology and becoming digitally accessible, the right target customers would come ready to spend — regardless of their age.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, business and marketing strategy, product development and branding, and content creation for green industry companies. lesliehalleck.com

Just when you thought your IGC had Millennial marketing down pat, experts on marketing to the Millennial generation are saying, “Not so fast.” This generation, whose brand loyalty and spending dollars are so in demand, no longer fit many generational assumptions — and it turns out some of those notions were inaccurate from the start. Millennials, roughly 20 to 36 years old this year, have matured. Your Millennial marketing may need to grow up, too.

Stereotypes that need to go

Four years ago, Millennial marketing expert Jeff Fromm was already reporting that maturing Millennials, also known as Generation Y, no longer fit the unattached, live-with-Mom-and-Dad stereotype. As a partner at ad agency Barkley and co-author of “Millennials with Kids,” Fromm reported in 2013 that the age group already accounted for 80 percent of all U.S. births. Today Fromm is even more adamant.

“It’s time to adjust. Millennials are not broke, unemployed and living in their parents’ basements,” he says.

Dr. Charlie Hall, Ellison Chair in International Floriculture at Texas A&M University, believes statistics on basement-living Millennials have been inflated all along. He made a surprising discovery while digging into government spreadsheets. A footnote deep inside the data explained that children living in dormitories were included in living-at-home numbers.

“Many people are misinformed about how many Millennials live at home. Just think of the numbers living in dorms,” Hall says. In actuality, the percentage of Millennials living at home is only slightly higher than the two previous generations, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, at the same age.

Katie Dubow, creative director of Garden Media Group, believes many other stereotypes need to go, too. “Entitled” Millennials are better understood as having high levels of self-esteem, and the idea of an impatient, “job-hopping” generation is unearned. Dubow points to a 2010 Pew Research Center study that found college-educated Millennials stick with employers longer than the previous generation at the same age.

And that “lazy slacker” image? Dubow says, “Think again. The way young adults work is simply different.” Unlike previous generations, Millennials prefer collaborating in teams, use breaks to aid productivity, and expect work to flow into evenings and weekends.

Parenthood and household shifts

Having children is one of the defining life events occurring for maturing Millennials, just as it’s been for every generation that’s gone before. But Millennial parenthood comes with different family dynamics than past generations.

“One in five stay-at-home parents is a dad, and that number is increasing dramatically,” Fromm says. He also reports a shift from the authoritative family dynamic of the past to a collaborative, family decision-making process, where kids have a voice as they get older.

Just the idea of Millennial parents contradicts stereotypes, but Dubow notes it’s important to understand how different the 10.8 million U.S. Millennial households with children really are.

“More than a million Millennials become moms each year, and there are more single-mother households that are Millennials than other generations,” Dubow says. She also notes that Millennials are much more likely to cohabit with their significant others. “Since 2011, Millennials have headed more households made up of unmarried partners than any other adult generation,” she explains.

Another key shift is where maturing Millennials are choosing to live. In contrast to past preferences for amenity-rich urbanized areas, Hall and Fromm say that Millennials forming households and having kids have set their sights on the suburbs.

Even though $1.3 trillion in student debt has delayed the process, Hall reports the cohort is buying. He quotes a recent Zillow report that shows more than half of U.S. homebuyers are less than 36 years old.

“There’s a new generation in town that’s shaping the future of real estate,” he says. “And when Millennials start showing interest in housing, that’s when their interest in lawn and garden products also increases.”

Diversity that demands attention

Despite the commonalities credited to this generation, Millennials are extremely diverse. Hall cautions against underestimating the impact of age, life experiences and life stages. “Individual tastes and preferences always trump cohort characteristics or stereotypes,” he says. Many of these preferences are influenced heavily by racial and ethnic backgrounds.

“One thing I think is not really on the radar of many garden center operators is that this cohort is more diverse than we’ve seen in any cohort before. Nine to 10 percent of homes sold now are to Hispanic Americans,” Hall says. Understanding the diversity of your local population is critical. “Salsa is the No. 1 condiment versus ketchup now. What’s our salsa in terms of plant material mixes we offer? That’s an interesting question to consider,” Hall says.

Dubow echoes the sentiment that it’s time to stop marketing to the same demographics and embrace diversity — in many forms.

“By 2020, 50 percent of U.S. children will be non-white,” she says. “While uncomfortable to admit, our industry is fairly white and we show those family models in our marketing. To truly attract Millennials, it’s important to remember that there are other demographics out there that garden.” Dubow stresses that this transcends race. “Consider these types of families: single-parents, multi-racial, multi-generational, stay-at-home dads.”

Repackaged projects and activities

A gardener himself, Fromm expects a surge in gardening fueled by Millennials starting families. For some parents, it will be a way to get away from it all. For others, gardening will be an activity for families to share in. But either way, they’ll want it to be fast, efficient and easy. “Millennials are changing brands because parenthood is causing them to change their lives. Parenthood brings responsibility and less time,” he says. “They’re looking for brands to simplify their lives. Retailers have to make it that way for them, or they won’t respond.”

Hall advises bundling your portfolio of products and services in bite-size, project-size increments. “There’s only a certain amount of time Millennials have to do their landscaping and interiorscaping. We’ve got to bundle our products in these 10- to 12-hour increments or 3- to 4-hour increments or 1- to 2-hour projects. Do that packaging for them, so they get everything for their project, from the pine bark to the plants,” Hall says. “We’re being very remiss in not doing it.”

New in-store direction

One stereotype that sticks is the Millennial generation’s inseparable union with technology. So, the question arises: Will they show up in-store? Dubow shares some encouraging statistics.

“According to behavioral marketing firm SmarterHQ, a whopping 50 percent of Millennials not only go to physical stores, they prefer going to them as a primary means of shopping,” she says. Even so, Dubow advises IGCs to not rely on in-store sales and invest in mobile-friendly e-commerce.

“41 percent of Millennials make purchases with their smartphone — and that number will continue to grow,” she says. “Be sure your website provides the best mobile experience possible, meaning everything done on your website should still be mobile.”

Fromm predicts that mobile shopping and in-store buying will go hand-in-hand. “I think we’ll see a big uptick in ‘shop online, buy in-store’ in the gardening space. The store is where I get final proof and pick up, but online is where I learn,” he says. “Millennials are going to look for brands that provide incredible expertise both in their store and online — and make it easy. It’s pretty important how you deliver a seamless experience to a mobile-first buyer.”

As the Millennial generation grows up — becoming parents, forming households and buying homes – the opportunities to meet their maturing needs abound. Hall thinks the industry has five to seven years before the bulk of Millennials hit these milestones and the full impact is felt.

“In the meantime, we can’t forget about the Boomers — they put us on the map. But we need to be prepared to lose that particular market segment as they continue aging,” he says. Tweaking your Millennial marketing to “grow up” alongside the Millennial generation will be essential to continued success.

Jolene is a freelance writer and former horticulture professional. Reach her at jolene@lovesgarden.com.

Contractors continue to settle back in — and then some — since the end of the Great Recession, making 2016 another solid year for the green industry. Landscaping companies had a median revenue of $291,000, which is up from $256,000 in 2015 and $217,000 in 2014. Slightly more contractors turned a profit in 2016 (86%) than in 2015 (84%) and 2014 (78%).

Landscape maintenance stayed as the most profitable service offered, and it regained the top spot as the most popular service provided after losing that spot to lawn care last year.

A lack of quality labor continues to be the top concern in the industry, especially for companies making more than $1 million in revenue. On a 1-10 scale (10 being a major concern), those companies ranked hiring a 7.8, compared to the average ranking from all companies, which was 6.5.

Personal stress, low-ball competitors and high health insurance costs also ranked as major concerns for landscapers. Bad weather fell in the middle of the pack this year as a concern, though this survey was taken before the hurricanes in Texas and Florida.

Two major issues Lawn & Landscape covered in last year’s State of the Industry were changed. One being a cosmetic chemical ban on lawns in Montgomery County, which was overturned in August. The other being a federal overtime rule that would have made employees making less than $47,476 annually eligible for overtime pay, doubling the current threshold of $23,660.