Ten things we learned at New England Grows

The 20th annual New England Grows event at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center was marked by outstanding attendance, both on the trade show floor and in the classrooms. Here are 10 things we learned at the show:

1. Good weather is a huge boon to a winter show. A best-in-recent-history crowd of 13,000-plus over the event’s Feb. 1-3 run was treated to reasonably balmy weather most of the time. Temperatures actually topped the 50-degree mark on two of the days, leaving attendees an easy track to the convention center – unlike the terrible storms that made venturing to the 2011 event at the very least formidable and in many cases impossible.

2. The “Garden Center Success” program certainly lived up to its name. Some 500 attendees heard winning business strategies from an array of speakers, whose informal theme was to encourage garden centers to be both courageous and innovative as they make plans for 2012. Dozens of those who attended the program visited the GIE Media Horticulture Group’s Pavilion to rave about how much they learned at the all-day seminar, held on Tuesday.

3. New products always strike a chord with show goers. We featured several items in the Friday report. Another company that enjoyed success with a new-to-the-market product was Organic Plant Magic, which markets an all-purpose organic plant food and organic fertilizer containing every plant-essential element plus more 70 beneficial trace minerals. It’s also alive with micro-organisms that benefit all plants and soils. The key word here is “all.” This product can be used in every plant-growing setting, from the lawn to the container.

4. A recent outbreak of Boxwood blight has a number of nursery operators concerned, and the show made a last-minute addition to its education program to include a session about the disease. Sharon Douglas, a plant pathologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, told the audience of the warning signs and the possible ramifications of the blight that has been spotted in a number of states early this year.

5. No matter the situation, you can turn it to your advantage. Chad Harris, one of the “Garden Center Success” speakers, said his company was hit by a tornado a few years ago. He said he and his wife  Beth had taken pictures of their garden center, The Garden Gates in Metairie, La., on the morning of the storm, both agreeing that the store never looked better. That night, as they watched the news, they saw live shots of the tornado ripping through their store. Chad’s immediate reaction was to use Twitter to contact each of the local television news teams, telling them he was headed to the store and would answer any questions they had. In a matter of minutes every local station had on-site reports from the store. In a matter of hours, many of the garden center’s customers arrived to help clean up damage. Ultimately, Harris said, every reporter and every anchor he visited with became customers of the store, as did thousands of other people who watched the reports.

6. While a lot of attention is being paid to Gen X customers as the successors of Baby Boomers, not much thought has been placed on Millennials, the 20-somethings who are “next in line.” At Rose Red & Lavender, an urban garden center in Brooklyn, N.Y., owner Kimberly Sevilla has made that demographic her primary target. Now her store is one of the destinations for that group, which, she says, is very environmentally conscious, much bigger in number than are the Xers and very eager to learn about gardening.

7. The living roof and living wall trend is only growing, both literally and figuratively. And at the show, WaterGrip introduced a wall and roof “brownie” that is a growing media product that combines traditional organic mix ingredients peat moss and coconut coir with proprietary ingredients to create a lightweight, hydrophilic matrix for green roof and green wall plants.

8. “Garden Center Success” facilitator Jon Hockman, who coaches executives as a principal at the d3 Group in Washington, D.C., challenged retailers at the outset of the program with a great question. He said there is no wrong answer, but garden center operators need to ask if they are plant people who do business or business people who do plants. He said that once you define yourself, you will have a much better idea about where you want to take the business. About 70 percent of the some 500 in attendance purported to be plant people who do business.

9. “Garden Center Success” keynote speaker Bill Taylor, a noted author and entrepreneur, said one of his favorite companies is Southwest Airlines, which has managed to thrive when other major airlines have struggled, particularly lately. One of the keys to this success, he opined, is the notion that people who work for the company obviously enjoy working for the company and have “bought in” to what the company’s braintrust is doing. He said that any business that doesn’t get its employees to believe in what it is doing will have trouble succeeding in this era.

10. Taylor also said the brands of the future will be people-oriented rather than technology-driven. He said today’s consumers are clamoring for stellar customer service and will reward a company that provides that.