Create 3-season color sales

Retailer

Stephen Barlow, Barlow's, Sea Girt, N.J.

Renae Bobbett, Beaver Bark Gift & Garden Center, Richland, Wash.

Philip Schaafsma Sr., Sid's Greenhouses, Home & Garden Showplace, Palos Hills and Bolingbrook, Ill.

Top sellers

Ivy geranium hanging baskets, Wave petunias, impatiens.

Geraniums, Million Bells calibrachoa and bacopa.

We still sell lots of geraniums, but specialty crops and color foliage has increased a lot. For those planting display beds, the Wave petunias are still a top seller.

Average price point 

4 1/2-inch vegetative is $4.98, 6- to 8-inch pot is $10.98, flat (36 plants) is $17.98, hanging basket is $24.98, 8-inch pot is $14.98

$4.99 for a 4-inch. We do multiple pricing that works well for us. Multiple pricing to us means: buy six for $2.99 each, regularly $3.99 each.

$2.99 to $4.99 for 4- to 4 1/2-inch pots (these increase in sales and price each year). $15.99 for flats for the last two years, but will increase this year by $1 or $2.

Spring

We are growing and marketing all of our potted vegetative annuals in a biodegradable rice hull pot. We also set up small displays that promote the eco-friendly benefits of the pot. Focusing on selling annuals through our container gardening programs will also be a major emphasis this spring. We provide classes and demonstrations, which draw customers to our large selection of annuals. Our free weekly class series highlights the different uses of annuals. During the spring months we have classes devoted to new annuals and how to use them in the landscape.

We vignette all of our endcaps with a theme, color, movement, fountain, statuary, pottery, fertilizer, etc., and have signage that pulls it all together with whatever plant we are featuring. We even paint the endcap benching to coordinate with the theme.

One major thing we are doing this year is giving our annuals more display space. It is part of our 'let's get back to basics' selling approach for 2008. More color on display means more sales. We sell too fast to try to separate by color, but we do set up displays by type of annual -- flats are in one area and potted annuals are in another. We try to set up several vignettes throughout the store tying in pots, tools, Crocs, gloves, arbors and other items to try to inspire the customers to buy more. We also do a lot of cross-merchandising, fertilizer, tools, gloves, pots, all displayed among or near the annuals. Color containers always sell and we grow as many as we can and buy in the rest. We also plant several large containers with color for near the entrance and plant up the parking lot annuals.

Summer

During the summer months we continue to promote our container gardening programs. We offer customers a service of 'rejuvenating your containers.' We encourage customers to purchase new products to fill in areas of their containers that may need a burst of color. We also offer a service where the customer brings their container to our store and we will fill it with overflowing color. We grow a line of 8-inch vegetative and seed annuals throughout the entire summer. This allows us to always have fresh product through August. We have found a strong demand for instant-color annuals in our beach resort community.

Our hanging baskets sell a lot of 4-inch annuals also. We display two gorgeous hanging baskets beside a bench that has only the annuals that are in those hanging baskets. It makes it easy for the customer to duplicate what they see or buy the basket all done if they wish.

For several years now we have continued selling color all summer. We slowly run out of flats and add larger pot annuals. We try to add new plants several times each week to keep the benches looking fresh. We also take a lot of our miscellaneous pottery and plant them up. We have been selling more tropical plants for patio pots and ground beds and we plan on continuing this in 2008. We sell croton for color and dracaena and palms. Even orchids are being offered as patio plants.

Fall

We accent our mums and pansies with different crops that contain fall colors. These include calibrachoa, ostespermum, petunia and nemesia. We have found that customers are looking for something more then the typical fall flowers, and these products have filled this niche. We grow a line of pre-done combo and monoculture baskets because our customers were looking for fresh flowering hanging baskets during the fall months. Continuing with the container gardening theme, we market fall color annuals for use in our customers' containers.

Our salespeople [are also] personal shoppers and can be creative with the customer. They really appreciate knowing what really will do well in our desert heat or in their shady spot.

We like to call it our color area, not just annuals, because we like to have fresh color available all year. We still have our summer color selling when our first garden mums are ready. We grow a batch that is forced to bloom early and by mid-August we have the mums ready to sell. Beside garden mums we offer aster, daisies and Proven Winners fall products. We also continue to offer containers, with bushel baskets full of plants very popular.