In Full Flower

by Carol Flake Chapman

...Page 1

While this kind of super-infomercial approach to the Web has since become commonplace, back then it seemed risky to some of the venture capitalists they approached for start-up funds—particularly those with no gardening experience. Lisa recalls that one potential investor's experience with plants was limited to ordering bouquets for his wife, and another's involved paying the bills to the professional landscape architect who accompanied his wife to the local nursery. Still, the partners were able to get backing from two venture-capital firms, Austin Ventures in Austin and Phillips-Smith Specialty Retail Group in Dallas, and later, from Doug Stern of New York­based Scripps Ventures. "I knew how big the gardening market was," says Stern, a past publisher of Horticulture magazine. "I also knew how big the barriers to entry in the market were. It's very hard to build relationships with growers, for example. They're all eccentrics."

At the time, Stern was also considering a business plan for Virtual Garden, a similar company that was being incubated at media conglomerate Time Warner, but he thought that the smaller Austin company had a better chance of making a go of it. "These are smart, nimble people," he says, "and I was convinced they'd outmaneuver Time. They're passionate and focused—and unconstrained by being part of a big corporation." Stern says he was "pleasantly surprised" when Garden.com bought Virtual Garden last year from Time Warner and struck a cross-promotional deal with Horticulture's Web site.

Even before the Garden.com site was established on the Web, the trio was able to persuade a number of suppliers to sign on—most of them, as it happens, located outside Texas. Companies like Burpee, which now has its own Web site, have been selling seeds and other goods through catalogs for more than a century, and many of the suppliers the partners approached were already set up to pack plants and send them through the mail. Milaeger's Gardens, for instance, a Wisconsin company that had been operating a mail-order business for eighteen years, agreed to supply perennials to the Garden.com site. In fact, the company liked the venture so much that it recently announced it was discontinuing its catalog entirely to focus on sales through Garden.com.

Garden.com's technical capabilities were boosted considerably when high-powered software developer Andy Martin, a native of Leeds, England, signed on as the chief technology officer. Martin had helped design an operating system for IBM and had worked at Trilogy, where he met Cliff, Lisa, and Jamie. Although he didn't know much about gardening at the time, he says he liked the idea of designing a system that would get more-immediate feedback from the "real" world than most software designs.

Since e-commerce was still in its infancy—it was now early 1996—the company was basically starting from scratch. Martin had to build not only a state-of-the-art Web site with bells and whistles but also an e-commerce system to deal with orders and an "extranet" system to connect with suppliers; for suppliers with minimal technical capabilities, the company was even prepared to supply computers. He wound up inventing a computer language just for Garden.com, which he dubbed SAGE (Software Architecture for Garden Escape). Martin worked with Barry Landry, the company's landscape architect, to design a feature for the Web site called Garden Planner. Similar to professional landscape-design software, the planner lets visitors to the Web site design their own gardens, using a graphed "plot" or a standard template and a drag-and-drop capability that allows them to move plants around. The program was one of the first such interactive features using JAVA computer language to appear on the Web. Another innovation was the Plant Finder, which allows customers to find their growing zone—and plants appropriate to the area—by typing in their ZIP code.

To produce the creative content on the site, the company hired veteran gardening expert Doug Jimerson, who had worked as an editor at Better Homes and Gardens. Jimerson and his wife were the proprietors of Cat Mountain Farm, a spread outside Des Moines, Iowa, whose beautiful gardens had been used frequently by magazines for photo shoots. With Jimerson firmly rooted there, the partners decided to launch a Midwestern office that he would head. Despite the cold winters, Iowa has better growing conditions than Austin, and most of the site's photos could be taken at Cat Mountain.

Under Jimerson's influence, the Garden.com Web site has come to resemble a gardening magazine not unlike Better Homes and Gardens, with lots of feature stories, profiles, and photo spreads of gardens. On a typical visit a user could select shrubs suitable for a shady garden, learn how to divide daylilies, and order a wreath for his mother-in-law. It's one of the most attractive sites on the Web, and it should make anyone's green thumb start twitching (though Garden.com's motto states that you don't need a green thumb, "just an index finger"). This spring it was logging more than 600,000 visitors a month, and through it, the company had signed up more than 450,000 "members," who can elect to receive regular e-mail reminders with gardening tips or special promotions.

"I think they do a good job of selling the dream of having a garden," says Jeff Govoni, the e-commerce manager for Gardener's Supply Company, a Vermont-based concern that sells "hard" goods—gardening tools and accessories—through a catalog and its own Web site as well as through Garden.com's site. But Govoni thinks that the company's main appeal is limited to beginning or recreational gardeners: "They attract people who think of gardening more as decorating and part of home design than as a serious kind of activity." Although the company doesn't release sales figures, its gross last year, according to one published source, was under $10 million. That's a long way from a big catalog company like Foster & Gallagher, which grosses almost half a billion annually. Meanwhile, competition is increasing as more older gardening-related companies set up shop on the Web with sites that often seem suspiciously similar to Garden.com's.

Amid these pressures, the three founders are finding it difficult to maintain the kind of corporate culture they've tried to promote, with a seasonal bash at a local park and Andy Martin doing magic tricks at the office Christmas party. The company, with its increasingly hectic pace, "is not for everyone," Lisa admits. "It's crazy and entrepreneurial. A lot of us feel that we're inventing as we go along." Says Jimerson: "If you stand still for five minutes, you're already way behind." Right now the founders are less concerned with the bottom line than with building their brand, a buzzword in e-commerce circles. Getting lots of exposure and accumulating loyal customers are seen by the money people as more valuable than turning a profit, Lisa says. As part of their "integrated media" promotion campaign (another e-commerce term), they've started advertising on a couple of cable networks and sponsored some gardening specials on TV. Changing the company's name from Garden Escape to Garden.com in early 1999 was part of that marketing promotion. "Being a '.com' company is no longer a turnoff," Cliff says. "It signals to people that you're going to have a big selection of products."

This spring the company launched a print publication, Garden Escape, which appears to be a stand-alone magazine but features mostly products and suppliers that also appear on the Web site. Almost everything in the magazine is for sale. Although a number of shelter magazines, including Better Homes and Gardens, also sell products through their magazines and Web sites, Garden Escape has gotten some flak from media critics for crossing the sacred boundary between editorial content and sales and advertising. They may get some criticism too from proponents of regional gardening, who find it somewhat ironic that Texans may wind up ordering their heat-hardy plants from Wisconsin or New Mexico.

At least part of the promotion campaign must be working, since the company's sales are growing at a rate of 300 percent annually, right up there with Amazon.com's. And the number of employees has been expanding at about the same pace, with nearly a hundred at last count. Having outgrown its cozy downtown headquarters, the company is in the process of moving into new offices in a large renovated warehouse in Northwest Austin. The old offices had no place for a garden, and the only plants a visitor spotted there recently were some dried-out posies and tired-looking bromeliads on a shelf near a window. But the founders have gotten permission from their landlords to start a big garden in front of the new building. Perhaps it's the down-to-earth nature of their specialty, but lately the folks at Garden.com have started talking about becoming a "real" company. "We don't want to be just the leading Internet gardening company," Lisa says. "We want to be the leading gardening company." Period. Or dot, as the case may be.

Carol Flake Chapman has written for House and Garden and Texas Monthly.

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