Profiled Web Site: Garden Escape

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Taking its cue from a certain online bookstore, Garden Escape (www.garden.com), an online gardening store and resource, boasts that it's the "Web's largest horticulture database." The site sells directly to consumers and has relationships with more than 35 suppliers, selling more than 10,000 products online. Garden Escape also publishes a monthly online magazine, hosts gardening-related chats, and helps people design gardens with a drag-and-drop planning grid. With 150,000 to 175,000 registered visitors, who's going to argue with the company's claim?

But what makes this Web-based business really unusual is the degree of customization and user interactivity. You can find out what will grow where you live by simply entering your zip code -- Garden Escape will even tell you when to plant it. And beyond (more specifically, behind) the details of gardening, you'll find some well-thought-out and unique Web technology designed to make each user's visit efficient and personally tailored. The site uses back-end coding that prevents browsers from caching pages -- which means that each user gets a customized site as they surf through it -- and Java that allows customers to plan a virtual garden and then buy exactly what they need to make it real.

Online since the first day of spring in 1996, Garden Escape is funded with $8 million in venture capital and based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Des Moines, Iowa, and Redwood City, Calif. The business employs about 30 people, including Andy Martin, who developed the Web site and now heads up the group of developers who maintain it. Martin talked to Inc. Online about why gardeners are the perfect online customer.

Why a garden Web site?

The interesting thing about the garden industry is there isn't any single company that has more than 1% of the industry. It's a $50 billion to $70 billion concern in America, and there are just no clear winners. That's one of the reasons we chose gardening in the first place. We could have done books or CDs like everyone else.

Garden Escape's drag-and-drop Garden Planner lets you map out a garden and then buy everything you need to re-create it at home.

Did you research the idea?

Well, I didn't, but Lisa Sharples and Cliff Sharples did. It was Lisa's original idea, and the three founders are Lisa, Cliff, and Jamie O'Neil. They all came from Trilogy Development Group, [ a software firm] , and formed the company in September of 1995.

They had spent about a year looking at various industries before they decided that gardening was it. It was certainly one of the hardest, but also the one with the biggest potential upside. Plants are not a commodity product; when you go down into plants, you have zones, seasons, shipping restrictions -- things you don't normally have to think about with commodity products.

How many visitors do you get?

At the moment we get between 6,000 and 8,000 a day. We're able to keep close track of the numbers because we don't allow browsers to cache any of our pages. Your mainstream software is not accurately tracking visitors to sites because of caching. It's really important for us to know how many users we've got and from where. We also analyze our registration data: we know from that, for instance, that 27% of our users come from California.

Do you have advertisers on your pages?

We have some. Very few at the moment. For the longest time, we didn't want banner ads, and we're still playing with that. Our model of making money is selling product, not selling advertising. But we have a lot of visitors now and we don't want to turn away too much cash. It's hard because I'm not sure if the ads that are running are quite what we want. The advertisers want to generate their own ads and we can't even see them until they're on our site. Most of the advertising on the site now is for us. Summer is the low point in gardening, so we had more advertisers on the site then.

Let's talk about the Web site itself. Did you build everything yourself?

I built the back end, the front end, the side end, everything. And I did that probably in about three months, from December 1995 until our launch in March 1996. We had a lot of problems. The initial goal was not to build everything ourselves, but we realized that we couldn't get what we wanted in a shrink-wrapped package. We got some graphics done from various Web companies, but all the real work was done by hand by me.

Garden Escape has more than 10,000 products for sale online.

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