If the company has one indispensable employee, it is probably Andy Martin, Garden.com's fourth partner after its three founders. In the early days he would have had trouble telling a daisy from a daylily, but he was not recruited for his horticultural expertise. Martin is Garden.com's chief technology officer, the true holder of the keys to the kingdom and the architect of the company's customer-service software. That software is so good at sifting information that a number of other E-commerce companies have sought to license it. Thus far, Garden.com has declined all bids.
Martin, tall and brainy, cuts an anomalous figure: an Englishman in Texan regalia of jeans and cowboy boots. Over lunch at a deli down the street from Garden.com's modest storefront, he turns the conversation to software issues, quickly ascending to an esoteric level. Yet the thrust of what he is saying is clear. "E-commerce is all about data mining," he says matter-of-factly. "With each click we retrieve 100 different pieces of information about you."
What Martin alludes to is the shadowy side of E-commerce--the loss of privacy for customers. Even a company as warm and fuzzy as Garden.com wields tremendous power, thanks to all the proprietary information it collects about each customer. In E-commerce the privacy issue is so delicate that it now carries its own happy-face label: personalization, the term for how Internet retailers are able to custom design their sites for each customer according to past buying patterns. As Lisa Sharples points out: "We now know what plants people have in their gardens. So we can tell them when to prune, when to divide them, when to fertilize them, and when to cover them." And with each of those advisories comes the chance to make another sale--and to find out just a little more about the buyer.
Because gardeners are so passionate about their hobby, Garden.com enjoys an advantage that an Internet giant like Amazon.com would envy. "I'd argue that one of [Amazon.com founder] Jeff Bezos's biggest challenges is how to make Amazon more of an emotional brand and less of a utility brand over time," says Internet retail consultant Kelly Mooney of Resource Marketing Inc. in Columbus, Ohio.
Because Garden.com hosts an information-rich Web site that also happens to sell 16,000 different items, the average visitor lingers at the site for half an hour at a time, says Mooney. That forges a strong "emotional connection" between customers and the company. "Garden.com has been very adept at pioneering emotion through the language and imagery they use," she says.
The emotional connection
Garden.com's ability to cozy up to its customers despite the cool barriers of cyberspace reflects the deliberate care and feeding of its brand. In fact, the company began with a gentler name, "Garden Escape," but the founders sought to change that to something more connotative of the Web. Still, they fretted about such a move, wondering if the techier "Garden.com" would put off gardeners.
The average visitor to Garden.com lingers because the site not only has visual appeal but also offers an array of features. Garden.com also produces a print magazine to complement its on-line magazine; both include columns by eight regional gardening writers. Editor-in-chief Doug Jimerson previously spent 18 years as an editor and writer at Better Homes and Gardens. Garden.com also has on-staff horticulturalists, as well as a landscape architect, who designs templates that customers can download free of charge. It claims to have one of the most extensive horticultural databases in the world, and it has a garden "doctor" and other experts hosting chat groups. Board member Steven Dietz of Global Retail Partners (which owns 12.5% of Garden.com) says, "People need a reason to go to a site beyond just buying something. With their content, there is a reason."
Mark Anderson, president of Strategic News Service, is an Internet-business analyst. "I worry that not enough scrutiny has been given to the basic question of how you create competitive barriers," he says. "In this economic landscape things get brutal fast. Companies selling things on the Net find themselves in downward price spirals which are frightening."
He says the only salvation is for a company to have "a strong brand and a good proprietary product" buttressed by information. "Anything which is information heavy does better on the Net," says Anderson. So far, Garden.com's strategy is exactly in tune with that view.
Best in class
Mark McGarrah, who runs the Austin ad agency McGarrah/Jessee Inc., is responsible for positioning--and polishing--the Garden.com brand. "We go out and experience the product with people. We want to see how gardening fits into their lives," he says. "Our strategic and creative teams actually get their hands in the dirt with them." McGarrah has found that gardeners are a passionate lot, deriving a lot of meaning from the creative outlet provided by their avocation.
In the founders of Garden.com, McGarrah discovered a passion of equal intensity--even if it is not for gardening per se. "I admire them for the zero-based approach they've taken," he says. "They sat down and defined the business parameters first: 'How can we build a national brand relatively quickly?' It's not from a love of gardening that they came to this."
