Designer Quality
Better Homes and Gardens can do it, Martha Stewart can do it (is she a bad reference now?), so why can’t a garden center? As we all know, people love to decorate their homes with green goods, especially during the holidays. What better way to promote yourself than to provide a few decorating ideas in your store and house the materials to make it within the same area? It not only brings attention to the beautiful design that you made, it shows customers that decorating with plants is easy and that you provide all the needed materials. Bordine Nursery, with locations throughout the Detroit area, does this extremely well, and it seems very successful with customers.
Bordine chooses an idea and uses the materials in the store to implement it. This adds ambiance to the store décor and gives the customers the itch to create. For example, when I visited them last Christmas, the design team had chosen a vase, filled it with various greens and some colorful fruit in the bottom, and displayed it for all to see. Close to the display, Bordine presented all of the items used for the project, as well as an instruction sheet giving customers detailed directions on how to duplicate the project.
At Christmas, you have a lot of wreaths; why not use them to spark customer creativity, by creating a snowman design, for example. And having the “cheat sheets” readily available makes it easy for the customer to just pick up the materials and go, plus you become the customer’s link to the latest and greatest trends in design.
There are so many possibilities for you to help a customer feel more creative in every season, and the benefit to you is a more satisfied customer leaving your store with more product in their hands. You have not only pleased a customer who will probably come back, you have also assured yourself that customer service makes a big difference.
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