Behind the quaint New England facade of White Flower Farm lies a market-driven company fueled by repeat business and one of the highest average orders in the industry.
White Flower Farm has an almost storybook look to it. The white cottage and horse barns converted to offices nestle amidst manicured lawns, colorful flower beds, and hedgerows. Although White Flower is in the mail-order nursery business, about 15,000 visitors drop by its retail store from April to October. Many want to see for themselves the place so handsomely photographed in The Garden Book, White Flower's catalog. Some plan their visit for the one weekend each summer when cucumber sandwiches are served outdoors, with owner Eliot Wadsworth II and his wife, Sandra, helping with the iced-tea pitchers. This year, the sandwiches required 48 loaves of Pepperidge Farm extra-thin white bread.
"Right now, we've got 450,000 perennials in the fields," says the 43-year-old Wadsworth. "And every morning I get up and run these fields with my dog, looking for things like disease problems and water problems. What a marvelous thing to be doing for a living. The idea of being paid to be out making notes in the trial gardens is indescribable."
Yet this is no starry-eyed horticulturist with a tendency to lean on his hoe and gaze across the fields. With planting in some cases a year and a half ahead of fulfilling orders, and catalogs printed months in advance, the mail-order nursery business combines the advance planning and seasonality of the fashion industry with the perishability problems of the restaurant trade. And Eliot Wadsworth II is as comfortable poring over a spreadsheet full of numbers as perusing a field abloom with phlox, as familiar with leveraged buyouts as with species of iris. He is a tough-minded businessman who has found exactly the right business to be in.
White Flower Farm, selling only select flowers, sets the highest standards in the industry. Still, it is far from the biggest seller of flowers and bulbs through the mail. Companies like Breck's, W. Atlee Burpee Seed, and George W. Park Seed ring up several times White Flower's annual revenues of nearly $7 million. But where many others merely buy in, mark up, and redistribute most of what they sell, White Flower is a fully integrated company. It does everything -- growing, picking, warehousing, fulfilling telephone orders, shipping, even advertising. The decision to do everything has limited the growth of the company. It also has ordered its priorities. Wadsworth has put his capital into computers, greenhouses, fields, irrigation ponds, refrigerated warehouses, and shipping capacity. "When you add to all the physical investment a huge marketing investment," he says, "the equation just doesn't work." Hence, the overall strategy of White Flower Farm: dedicated service to repeat customers. White Flower showers its upscale customers with education, grooms them with unflagging service, and harvests the benefits -- loyal repeat buyers who, at over $60 a shot, undoubtedly place one of the highest average orders in the business.
"In a helter-skelter workaday world, White Flower shows it's possible to start with the clients' needs, work back, and still have a substantial financial success," says board member Bruce Schnitzer, a private merchant banker. "White Flower Farm is one of those places that restores the faith."
Located just south of Litchfield, Conn., White Flower Farm began as a hobby of a Fortune magazine writer named William Harris. Harris and his wife would leave their Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan on Friday afternoons and head for western Connecticut, they soon were bent over the gardens of their weekend home, a late eighteenth-century cottage. The name White Flower Farm, apparently, came from their foundness for white blossoms, which were easier to see as they worked the soil well past dusk. Although Harris turned his avocation into a mail-order business in 1950, he continued to run it more like a hobby right up until the mid-1970s. Which is when Eliot Wadsworth II showed up.
Wadsworth, out of business school, had spent a few years here, a few years there, without really finding his niche in the business world. He started out in investment banking in New York, where he got his first glimpse of leveraged buyouts. His next stop was Maine, where he co-owned several Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. While his partner oversaw day-to-day management, Wadsworth negotiated for real estate, built stores, hired and trained staff, and held the marketing reins. He was working nights and weekends, and, ensconced in the Maine woods, says he was "fearful of protracted bachelorhood." So he sold out to his partner, and went on to become an acquisitions analyst with now-defunct American Garden Products Inc., a Boston-based wholesaler and retailer. Wadsworth discovered then that "the guys who had the job I wanted were running nurseries." White Flower Farm, especially, caught his eye.
The place was beautiful, and it grew and shipped a quality product. It was also, in Wadsworth's view, "significantly undermanaged." Harris was close to 80 and in failing health." Whatever else was going on," Wadsworth recalls, "they had not compromised their standards of taste and quality." At the same time, Wadsworth saw his peers, perhaps nudged by the environmental movement and back-to-the-earth sentiments, turning to gardening. In short, he saw the wind at his back and a perfect opportunity: a business with good rootstock, good opportunity for growth, and, not so incidentally, the chance to fashion a wonderful lifestyle. He signed up as general manager.
After proving himself "honorable" to Harris, Wadsworth bought the business in January 1977 for a price he describes "in the neighborhood of annual sales," which were then approaching $750,000. His Wall Street experience came in handy, for this, he says, "was a leveraged buyout with the leveraged in capital letters." To his small earnings from his restaurant business, Wadsworth added loans from local farm cooperatives and working capital and mortgage money from the Bank of Boston. And he talked Harris into accepting some two-year promissory notes.
