Green Industry Experts Join Forces to Benefit Independent Garden Centers
A new coalition of green industry experts plans to help independent garden centers (IGCs) reap the rewards of the millennial market.
Centered around Smart Plant Home, an app designed to track customers’ plant purchasing habits and provide expert growing advice — with the ability for retailers to link directly to the customer to suggest care, purchases, and promotions — the alliance offers a cohesive network of services for IGCs. Members of the coalition include:
- Bert Wahlen, CEO, Smart Plant Home: An app reportedly trusted by hundreds of thousands of plant owners and created with independent garden centers in mind, Smart Plant Home features products, plants, videos, and information customized by IGC and per user. With 89% of the app’s audience falling into the 18-44 age demographic, Smart Plant Home serves as the central hub to attract a younger audience to IGCs.
- Shaun Quinlan, President and CEO, Prince Corp.: With a customer network of more than 3,000 IGCs, farm stores, and pet specialty stores throughout the Midwest, Prince Corp. understands retailers’ needs. As part of the coalition, the company intends to help retailers reach a younger, more technologically savvy audience for profitable growth.
- Ken Klopp, CEO, The Perfect Plant: The in-store digital engagement of The Perfect Plant’s information centers gives retailers a tool to train employees, engage customers, and enhance consumer plant knowledge — all customized to the IGC. It’s an ideal marriage of Smart Plant Home, a personal app for consumers customized by retail location, and the on-site kiosk and website plugin of The Perfect Plant at retail.
- Jeff Dinslage, CEO/President, Home and Garden Fulfillment Inc.: With a network of 20 plant and hard good fulfillment locations, Home and Garden Fulfillment helps retailers reach new markets by enabling them to expand their product line and tap the eCommerce sales channel. The solution has a revenue share component that incentivizes all parties to ship healthy plants safely and in accordance with all state and federal regulations.
Connecting to younger customers and increasing foot traffic at retail serves as an overriding goal of the coalition. Using the Smart Plant Home app, customers create a digital garden of their plants, giving retailers a footprint of all the plants the users own. Based on the app’s information, retailers understand their customers’ buying preferences, allowing the retailer to send customized notifications that encourage like-plant purchases at the IGC, in-store promotions, or announcements of special events based on the customer’s zip code.
Smart Plant Home retail members benefit both from the trackable information available and the direct contact with customers in their region. As a Smart Plant Home retailer, all of the IGC’s plant and product inventory is uploaded to the platform, allowing customers to scan bar codes on site for product information and to upload plants to their digital gardens. When a customer scans a plant on site, the app changes to feature that store’s home screen, plants, promotions, events, videos, and more. Users’ zip codes connect them to their local IGCs.
for more information, contact Smart Plant Home, [email protected]; Prince Corp., [email protected]; The Perfect Plant, 888.85.PLANT; and Home and Garden Fulfillment Inc., 866.335.0975, [email protected].
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