Plantpeddler facilitates coverage of unique poinsettias

With the holiday season around the corner, Plantpeddler coordinated with Better Homes & Gardens magazine to produce an article and photoshoot in its December issue to feature non-traditional, unique and novelty poinsettias. Mike Gooder, owner, and Stacy Bryant, sales representative, shared what went into this project with Better Homes & Gardens.

Better Homes & Gardens wanted to do an article on novelty and non-red poinsettia varieties with the goal of promoting the fact that there are more options available than just red poinsettias. When most people think of poinsettias, they think of the color red, which goes with the traditional and standard red-green color scheme that dominates the holiday season. But according to Gooder, Plantpeddler wants to expand and redefine what poinsettias can be in consumers’ minds. “Hopefully it does what it's supposed to do and works some magic at retail for the smaller independent garden centers,” Gooder says, adding that this is “the ultimate goal” of the article.

Gooder describes the red poinsettia as a crop that’s “abused” by marketing. “There was a lot of devaluation that went on in poinsettias when it became a loss leader at Black Friday,” he explains. “We went from the perception of a poinsettia being a $15 to $20 premium retail flowering plant to a get-six-for-$10-or-$2.00-apiece crop, so quality suffered. The image of the poinsettia took a beating.”

“If you go into a big-box store, you'll see very limited colors,” Bryant says. “You'll see, obviously, red, and maybe you used to see some pinks and whites, but even now it's almost dominated by red. So, there are a lot of people that really don't even know there are all these really cool fancy colors out there. And it's wonderful that Better Homes & Gardens could take it to the public like this and have a really gorgeous article that shows off some of these unique things that poinsettias bring to the holidays.”

“We always put a nice mix of novelties in our production,” Bryant says. “When we send the poinsettias out to retailers, they're always going to get some unique novelties, [along with] their reds, whites and pinks, but they're also going to get some unique novelty.”

This expansion into less standard colors and varieties comes with some risk. Everyone along the whole supply chain needs to be willing to take the risk of offering different varieties.

Gooder says that getting the customer to buy the novelty variety is the hardest thing to do. But Plantpeddler has taken this risk before when they started selling painted poinsettias. When they started this, Gooder says, “We had to guarantee to retailers, and I had almost a 100% claim because no one wanted a blue poinsettia, but now we sell thousands and thousands.”  

“So, it sometimes hurts to be on the bleeding edge, but you have to go there if you're going to change the dynamic of the conversation,” Gooder adds.

With this Better Homes & Gardens article, Gooder hopes that consumers will ask retailers for these unique, non-red poinsettias this holiday season. The goal is for consumer demand to start a backwards domino effect where retailers will tell growers that they need more of the novelty varieties for the 2023 holiday season because so many people asked for them in 2022, and so growers will start offering those varieties for the next season.