Lawn & Garden Retailer: Inspired Solutions for Profitable Business
Welcome to the premier issue of Lawn & Garden Retailer, a magazine dedicated to giving L&G retailers the solutions they need to create more profitable businesses.
Sounds good, doesn’t it, but what does that really mean — solutions for profitable businesses. Will Lawn & Garden Retailer be featuring case studies? Hard good opportunities? New trends? Marketing solutions?
The quick answer is yes. As the following pages will show you, Lawn & Garden Retailer is a unique magazine in that it is a true hybrid, offering feature-length articles on topics such as off-season promotions and store layout, as well as extensive product focus sections that detail the newest developments and products in each of the major categories. In short, we’ll be covering every aspect of lawn and garden retailing because we believe that a comprehensive approach is the only way for garden centers to remain competitive in the current retail environment.
Independent garden centers are seeing increased pressure from mass merchandisers, coupled with a lagging economy and a host of other challenges. We believe the best sales tactic in this climate is to shift from selling customers a flat of impatiens in the spring and a few mums in the fall to selling them a lifestyle, specifically the gardening lifestyle. The message behind Lawn & Garden Retailer is how to sell more product to each customer.
You can see this philosophy reflected in each feature article in the January issue. For example, “A Proper Pottery Department,” by Judy Sharpton, page 6, is a case study about how redesigning and relocating a pottery department increases tie-in sales. The pottery department at A Proper Garden, Delaware, Ohio, was redesigned as the focal point for customers heading toward check out — after they had selected plants, exactly when they needed accessories, without having to carry breakable items around the grounds.
Stan Pohmer argues a similar point in this month’s column, page 52. He believes garden centers should focus their efforts on those customers that will produce the highest returns. We believe these high-return customers are the ones that are already in your store. In addition to hooking new customers, we need to be maximizing the ones we already have, and Lawn & Garden Retailer is going to show just how achievable this goal can be.
Videos
