Rebirth

Ellen C. Wells

I often write this column a good month or so in advance of when you’ll likely be reading it—even further out if you let your magazines pile up like I do and read them months after the fact. And I often think to myself as I begin, “Gosh, will what I’m writing now be relevant in a month or two? Anything could happen between now and then.”

I’m writing this on Easter Sunday. As I sit here, that thought I think each month is glaringly accurate. Thanks to the pandemic, any current information I provide here could be wildly incorrect in a day, let alone in a month. Who really knows what the state of affairs will be by the time you read this? One of my favorite memes I saw in March has two panels, the top one quotes someone as saying something like “The first three months of 2020 have been dreadful, it couldn’t possibly get worse.” The next panel is labeled April and depicts a lovely spring morning—and the Death Star hanging in the sky like the moon. I’ve been giving the moon a more thorough inspection lately, just in case.

What Easter, spring, the pandemic and most definitely the Star Wars saga have in common is the promise of rebirth. The COVID-19 crisis might not seem like it has anything promising at its end, I hear you, but contagions do eventually lessen as we get stronger and/or smarter. Once it’s been tamed or conquered, we’ll assess the damage, for sure. But we’ll also learn what worked and what didn’t, and then incorporate these lessons into how we live and do business.

Because it’s all about to change.

So what will this rebirth from the pandemic look like for garden centers? There’s a genre of sci-fi movies where the human race is contained in a bubble to be protected from the outside toxic environment. I don’t think it’ll be quite like that. But what I do see from my vantage point in April looks like:

Continuing robust online sales. If you had online sales before, you were ready to roll for the demand as the pandemic hit. Those who weren’t got real familiar with the possibilities fast. And now that you’ve made it easy for customers to place orders for pick-up or delivery, expect customers to continue with this sales option.

Bundles and packages. Gardens to go, if you will. It’s the simplest way for customers to place orders. Smart growers will get in on that, too, providing garden centers with those products already packaged.

Service providers. Whether it’s pulling an order, loading a trunk or delivering a bundled garden and even setting it up, the “do it for me” option suddenly became the only option. I think folks are going to realize how much they enjoy the time they’ve gotten back now that someone else is doing all the work. 

Content is crucial. We’ve all become wary of being too close to one another, and certainly not for more than a masked hello. I don’t see that suddenly ending. But customers still need information and have questions. What to do? We’ve all become video and Zoom experts lately. Continue that with online garden consults, inventory tours and live topical classes. And don’t forget the importance of written content, too. 

I also don’t see the kindness and caring that’s come from this common global situation abating anytime soon. Not that garden center folk weren’t kind and considerate to begin with, of course. There’s been a lot of loss from this—loss of loved ones, loss of stability, loss of jobs, loss of businesses. What we won’t lose is the greater sense of commonality and community that have risen from a shared experience. We will emerge—a little beaten and bruised, sure—but we will indeed emerge, and I bet as more forgiving and understanding people.

All bets are off, though, if the Death Star does actually pop up over the horizon. GP