Adapting to Change

All-America Selections celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, and as part of the celebration, Greenhouse Management will interview a different AAS judge each month to talk about how he or she runs his or her business and what AAS means to them. This is the second installment of the 12-part series.

Jenny Kuhn has watched the industry change in recent years as companies go out of business and those that remain face increased challenges as a result of the down economy. As the industry has changed, Kuhn has also been challenged to stay ahead of those changes.

One of the biggest changes she’s seen has been in ordering habits and how products are ordered.

“[There’s] less and less pre-ordering, more at once, and people are being very conservative and then needing more product last minute,” says Kuhn, who serves as product support for C. Raker & Sons Inc. in Litchfield, Mich. “As a plug and liner producer, that puts a lot of pressure on us to have availability at the last second and not eat it.”

To overcome that challenge, her team tries to speculate on certain crops that they know have a tendency to sell well.

“We’re very active in talking to all the sales reps to get a feel for where their bookings are,” she says. “We’re pushing them to make sure people are still trying to hit their sticking deadline so we don’t have to rely exclusively on speculation because that’s never a good way to go.”
 

C. Raker & Sons in Michigan is an AAS trial site. The company started with seed-propogated items but has had to change to more vegetative items as product demand has shifted.

Part of that is staying close with the breeding companies.

“Some of it is just talking to the breeding companies and knowing how they market items and determine what’s going to be a big seller,” Kuhn says. “Breeding companies have a lot of marketing dollars, and you know they’ll be turning a lot out there, so you know there will be high demand.”

For example, Kuhn says that PanAmerican Seed is releasing Cool Wave Pansies.

“Anything with the Wave name is going to have instant recognition all the way down to the retail level,” she says. “By tying in this cascading pansy with the Wave name, and knowing historically that has been a very prominent marketing endeavor for anything related to Wave, the media and the trade magazines will be saturated, and there will be high demand for those items, even though we haven’t even seen them.”

And then another challenge for her has been the transition from mostly seed items to more and more vegetative items.

“We’ve seen a decrease in seed propagation,” she says.

Raker started out exclusively as a plug range growing only seed-propagated items, but in the last 10 years, it’s started getting into vegetative items. This has required Raker to remain flexible and develop relationships and retrofit its production range to accommodate rooting things from cuttings.

“There’s a lot of things that are driving that change because of the quality of the items from URCs are generally better,” Kuhn says. “You can’t get a truly good seed geranium when you start comparing them to the vegetative types. There are so many crops that can’t legitimately be done from seed. These are the new generation, the niche items, the things the industry is moving toward.”

For more: C. Raker & Sons Inc., (517) 542-2316 or www.raker.com