The company fills up both floors of a recycled post office opposite the Mill Valley firehouse. Downstairs, a third of the 22 employees sit in chest-high acoustic cubicles and handle orders and inquiries by mail and telephone. Sometimes they post data into a computer terminal; other times they counsel a caller at length until the problem is solved. On slow days, the first floor is virtually silent. On busier days, just after a half-million-catalog mail drop, for example, the noise and bustle match the trading floor of a grain exchange. Upstairs, the imported garden tools of a dozen nations and a score of manufacturers fill supply shelves, awaiting order pickers and mailers. To the untutored eye, then, Smith & Hawken is simplicity itself: It takes the orders downstairs, it fills them upstairs. In fact, its stategy is subtler than this suggests.
For one thing, Hawken has paid attention to market conditions. He noticed how Americans hated their garden tools but the British loved theirs, how American companies made throw-away tools but the British and other overseas companies kept alive a centuries-old craft of toolmaking, and how American companies treated gardening as a chore to get through quickly while the overseas toolmakers saw it as a craft and possibly an art.
"People enjoy it," argues Hawken. "They express themselves in the garden. They want the moment to last. They want to get as deeply involved as they can."
Clearly, the Smith & Hawken approach is also direct. By eliminating middlemen, the company can sell its tool at much lower prices than a conventional distributor or retailer could. It also puts the company closer to its customers and lets it do more to shape the way they interpret the tools and Smith & Hawken itself.
It obviously puts a strong premium on information. The company's major information vehicle, of course, is its quarterly catalog. Hawken writes the copy himself, takes the photographs, designs the book. His text carefully explains the history, the nature, and the uses of the tools. "We want our tools to mean as much to gardeners as their gardens do," explains Hawken. The catalog is used to create this sense of meaning.
The company also cultivates the information base of its employees. It hires people with an interest in its ethos of quality and service, pays them about $10 an hour -- well above the normal rate for catalog order clerks -- offers them incentive stock option plans after two years, and expects them to learn the products and business itself, largely through job-rotation and the sharing of such tasks as data entry and grabbing the ringing phones. "Everyone here can talk tools," says Hawken. And task-sharing and job-rotation create more than just knowledge, argues Laura Burgess, the office manager. "It creates a sense of mutual sympathy. We all know what our colleagues are doing; we understand how it connects to the whole, and it gives us a sense of almost organic unity."
The craft lies in the tools, the sense of service lies in the staff, and Smith & Hawken's people trust in their own experience of their own products. "We love the tools," says 39-year-old Lou Wheeler, who does his own gardening on the weekends. "We know we're going to make our customers feel good by getting the tools and letting us help them to use them."
Although there is a sympathy at the center of Smith & Hawken, its corporate culture also looks outward to its customer base. For this reason, and because the company doesn't get locked into rigid ways of doing things -- "What makes it fun here is that we make it up as we go, and come into the office every morning wondering what we'll think to try next," says Laura Burgess -- it might be evolving into a new and interesting form. Once a tool hooks a gardener and turns the person into a customer, the company is committed to serving the customer's gardening interests in the fullest sense. "We'll frequently help customers to find and get things we don't sell," says Wheeler.
Smith & Hawken has joined Brookstone Co., a unit of The Quaker Oats Co.; and Gardener's Eden Inc., an offshoot of the highly successful catalog marketer Williams-Sonoma Inc., in the arena of high-quality garden tools. But Smith & Hawken's sense of personal commitment and involvement with customers can give the company an edge against even those foes. As the customer base grows, and as customer-driven services become diverse, Smith & Hawken is likely to become virtually a membership organization -- a vast garden club, tied together by the mail and the phone, and tutored and staffed at the center by the Mill Valley professionals.
This freedom to grow by following the wind and the slant of the ground is what pulled Hawken into business 18 years ago and what keeps him there today. He stepped onto the bottom line in the middle 1960s, a time when members of his generation were taking to the streets to protest the involvement of American corporations in Vietnam. Characteristically, Hawken paid close attention to what was happening then and drew a distinctive conclusion: "If a corporation has the freedom to create such evils as napalm and Agent Orange, then think of the freedom corporations have to do good." Hawken pauses for a pulse beat and then concludes:
"Of course, this freedom would mean a lot more if a lot more of us would get into business and use it."
