Retail insights with a focus on technology
Nearly 1,000 retailers and building supply companies gathered Nov. 19-21 in National Harbor, Maryland, for Epicor Insights for Building Supply and Retail 2025.
The three-day event focused on business trends and the technology that supports them, including discussions on artificial intelligence (AI).
AI in Retail: Empowering Expert Answers
Carl Hildebrandt, vice president of product management, works with store owners to solve day-to-day challenges at the counter, in the aisles and in the yard with easy-to-adopt tools. He said one of the challenges many garden centers — and retailers in general — face is fielding customer questions.
“You don’t know what question is going to come out of their mouth,” he said. And while a seasoned employee has heard all the questions, a newer employee hasn’t, and might have to rely on a more experienced coworker to assist. He said that by using AI in retail, even day 1 employees can answer questions that they might not have otherwise understood.
He said when they are developing solutions, “we really are looking at the problems that are pervasive in the market so that we can start working on solutions. We want to tune it to actual problems that are being faced today.”
Staff scheduling can be another trouble spot for many retailers. He said Epicor products have the ability to accomplish what he called ”proactive scheduling.”
“We have the ability to forecast what demand might be coming based on historical sales. So it’ll ingest five years of sales history and look for traffic patterns and then give you an hourly breakdown of where we think you need the most coverage for customer-facing roles.”
Automation Accelerates Time to Value
A common theme at the event was that AI is a tool to create shortcuts to accomplishing tasks — not a people replacement.
Arturo Buzzalino, group vice president and chief innovation officer, said that AI is beneficial for accelerating time to value for businesses — meaning that businesses can benefit from the software sooner by automating repetitive tasks and saving valuable employee time. He cited writing a long email as a candidate for using AI.
“It’s choosing things that are painful or repetitive, but really easy for AI to adopt.”
For retailers, he said he’s most excited about adopting AI into their enterprise resource planning systems. “In ERP, our users waste so much time trying to do an action, like putting in a list of purchase orders — you have to go to Excel, you have to load them up in Excel, and then you have to check all the data. It’s so manual and time-consuming,” he said.
“What excites me is being able to automate these things and liberate all these people from doing these like super monotonous and repetitive tasks and allowing them to do what they like to do — have a conversation, think strategically, improve the processes, grow.”
Changing Demographics of Garden Retail Customers
On the retail side, garden center managers I spoke to noted a shift in customer demographics. Kara Harris, business manager at Madison Garden Center dba Barrett’s Showplace in Adrian, Michigan, said they’re seeing customers skew younger.
“We have had a lot more younger people coming in — people who don’t even know how to garden are coming in,” she said, as well as families coming in wanting to learn how to garden. As a result, they’ve introduced some education classes to help them learn, like “Gardening 101,” as well as classes on beekeeping and preserving the harvest via canning.
Naples, Florida-area Driftwood Garden Center is seeing a similar customer trend.
“While the area we live in is very specific to older people — our demographic is typically women over 40 — we are getting more younger people in,” said Michelle Dubois, store manager. “We’re seeing more families with children. We didn’t see as many kids in our garden center a few years ago, and now we’re seeing more kids in our garden center.”
Similarly, they’re emphasizing education to capture and retain these new customers. “We’re offering a lot more classes these days,” she said, as well as formatting social media posts to be more educational.
Younger customers are driving an increased demand for houseplants, especially exotics said Autumn Canning, houseplants department manager.
“Demand for more rare and exotic type plants has gone up in the last few years as the houseplant trend has been more popular, and that brings in more of the younger demographic in as well,” she said.
“Plants are always one of our bestsellers,” Dubois said. “We’ve also done really well with décor this year. We have a whole indoor décor section that’s everything from baskets to wall art to patio furniture — anything to make your outdoor area look beautiful and your indoor area look beautiful. We’ve had a pretty good uptick with those items, things that people are redoing their places with.”
Loyalty Programs Drive Repeat Business
Technology has been a mainstay for both garden retailers, providing relief from mundane tasks and for coming up with ideas and content.
“ChatGPT helped us come up with our name for [loyalty program] Leaf Loot,” Harris said, which has proven to be a strong way to retain customers and generate loyalty.
“It amazes me how many people in the program are excited about it,” she said. Store cashiers are trained to pull up customers’ names in their P.O.S. system — Propello — and ask them if they want to use any rewards they’ve earned.
“They get really excited about using a $5 reward,” she said. Or sometimes they’ll be just shy of enough points to earn a reward and will want to spend the extra dollar or two to get to the next level, “so we rearranged our cash registers to have a lot more impulse buys that are easy to add on.”
Of their approximately 8,000 rewards members, Harris said they spend on average 15-21% more than nonmembers.
Dubois’ store loyalty program has around 16,000 members. She said using Epicor’s Eagle P.O.S. system, and she can track how customers shop and what they lean toward. “The loyalty program helps us to bring people back, as well as to find any of their receipts, to find their transactions in the case of returns.
“We’ve had Eagle for over 20 years,” she said. “It has a lot of capabilities — everything from inventory to mobile apps, and even now down to trucking — they integrate the whole thing.”
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