Gage says that he is routinely besieged by Internet entrepreneurs wanting to market his products on the Web. "Someone takes a shot at me nearly every day," he says. "Most of these guys don't know what they're talking about."
Garden.com, though, was different. After O'Neill visited him in Nebraska, Gage subsequently flew to Austin three times to ask hard questions of the partners, beginning with "How is this going to be different from all the other crap I've seen?"
The answer was clear and direct. "Number one, they were going after a new customer, the new American gardener," says Gage. "The person they described was pretty much my customer already--women 30 to 50, college educated, with no time to screw around going to every garden center on the weekend. She has four hours for gardening on Saturday and needs the stuff to arrive on Friday."
Gage adds that "the backroom stuff"--customer fulfillment--is the key to making his business hum. "Their ability to speed up and rationalize that process really helps." Garden.com has worked closely with Federal Express to develop a highly automated order-entry and fulfillment system that allows customers to track their own shipments. Gage boasts what he calls "the first greenhouse shipping operation designed around an Internet high-volume operation." And his business is on fire. He has just finished building a fifth new greenhouse. Garden.com will account for 60% of his total volume of sales this year and perhaps as much as 80% next year. "My own business is up 1,000% in the past two years, and the bulk of that is from Garden.com," he says.
That has put Gage, formerly a foundation executive and the CEO of two wholesale distribution companies in New York City, in a curious position. He is suddenly riding a bull of a business--like it or not. "I started this business so I wouldn't have to retire," he explains. "Now I'm working more than I ever have. I work 75-hour weeks, easy." His exclusive with Garden.com amounts to a two-year letter of intent from the company. The two parties have already discussed the ticklish situation of adding a second supplier--a would-be competitor--once Garden.com maxes out Gage. "My lawyer and accountant said I was nuts," he says, laughing.
In the meantime, "I've borrowed all the money I can in order to do this. I just spent $250,000 I wouldn't have ordinarily spent," Gage says. Asked if that money will improve his productivity, he replies: "It damn well better. If they slow down or peel off, I'm going to be struggling."
The price of success
Nobody at Garden.com plans to slow down. The prospects have always been too rosy. From the absolute beginning, "we were very confident, probably navely so," says O'Neill. "We felt that our convictions were really well based, and we put our minds to it. We were not scrounging around in the dark looking for cool ideas. We knew E-commerce was going to be huge. And when we hit on gardening, it felt so right."
"Cliff and Lisa are very optimistic. That optimism gives them confidence and allows them to succeed," echoes ad executive McGarrah. "This company has an incredible spirit of adventure. It's a place that seems very chaotic and feels very temporary. There's plastic lawn furniture in the conference room. Nothing is important to them except succeeding."
If confidence is the necessary seed of E-commerce success, then insight is the culture that allows the seed to grow. What Cliff Sharples saw was that Garden.com would belong to a second, and now just cresting, wave of Internet retailing, in which commodity-based transactions have given way to those that are more specialized and value added. Today, with the increased flexibility of the Net, buyers can know more about what they're purchasing than ever before. People now buy specialty items over the Net--and will do so increasingly more often.
Within that more nuanced universe, Garden.com's founders understood that they needed to capture a niche that others had overlooked: the archaic world of gardening. They had to not only reeducate the industry but also remake it. "It's a very interesting market without a ton of competition," says John Thornton.
Steven Dietz says that Garden.com's management "has been very creative in coming up with innovative solutions in an industry that really hasn't changed much in a long time. These guys did a great job getting the growers they work with to see the vision and change business practices."
In Austin one spring afternoon, Jamie O'Neill shows a visitor around the company's new headquarters under construction. Garden.com is expanding into a 24,000-square-foot space in a warehouse alongside a freeway. Walking through the empty space, O'Neill discusses the new features of the expanded corporate HQ. There is to be a garden out front, so employees can get their hands dirty at lunchtime. Conference rooms will be painted various hues and named after particular plants. But most of the space is still a blank slate, probably destined to become something out of "Dilbert"--a maze of cubicles and computers.
If there is one characteristic that the company's old and new offices share, it's that both discriminate against natural light. There are still no windows at Garden.com. The company will grow like a weed, serving a burgeoning community of devoted gardeners and outdoor enthusiasts, but it has chosen to do so without seeing the sun.
Edward O. Welles is a senior writer at Inc.
