Owner: Jenny Gunderson and Bill Raynolds
City/Town: Mill Creek, Washington
Company Website: mygardennursery.com
Size: Retail - 4 acres
Sales Range: $1 million - $2,999,999
Years In Business: 5
Number Of Permanent Locations: 1
Number Of Pop-up Locations: 0
Tell us how you use social media to better serve your customers.
We have a daily blog about heucheras and other My Garden information on our website. We have some people who read it daily. We do videos on YouTube and on our website. We participate in the Best of Western Washington contest for Garden Centers. We get tons of positive comments from our customers that are then read by others. We email once a month to let our customers know why to visit us and we share pics, etc. We are starting to use Facebook and Twitter to talk with our customers.
Tell us how you work with other local businesses on customer outreach.
We have events where other businesses can have a booth. We have other businesses use our space for events. Bill is on the board of the local business association and we share what is happening and why they should send their customers our way. Margie, our events and fundraising person, is very active in the community and brings a sense of family to our store and to the neighborhood. Come visit us. I promise she will find out more about you in two minutes than your local grocery store or nursery knows about you after shopping there for years.
Finally, and most importantly, what makes your garden center Revolutionary?
Some of the exciting and revolutionary things we have done in 2011 are The 365 Days of Heuchera blog on our website. We had a HUGE event called Don't Wine about Your Container's with Ciscoe Morris. An event with wine and a seminar BUT where customers purchased planters and plants and potted them up with the personnel help of celebrity Ciscoe Morris. People LOVED it! It got customers into My Garden between two and three times and sales plus FUN were HUGE! We have a Birthday Club and our Frequent Flower Point Program which continues to spread the word about My Garden without doing typical advertising. We had a Fairy Festival that created quite a buzz and brought a bunch of new customers to us early in the season. We also have been doing the fairy garden seminars for a year now. We sell at a high margin all the items that go with them and will will be selling them online in a month. We have a U.S. Contract Post Office in our store and so it made sense for us to use it and the fairy merchandise is light weight and easy to ship. We are in our fifth year and have had growth in sales and profits every year during this weekend economy and extremely bad weather. You may not call higher sales and profits revolutionary BUT in these trying times everything we do drives us towards that goal. By creating a FUN, neighborhood nursery that people shop at regularly we succeed. Customers don't wait for discount sales as we don't have them. We sell almost everything at regular price.Customers shop when they want/ need things or can't help themselves because our staff have created a fun and inspiring environment and displays with plants and products that say TAKE ME HOME, I will make you HAPPY and your LIFE BETTER, not because the products are discounted. We change the look of our store all the time and people say that is one of the reasons they keep coming back. We have lots of unique things like moss life sized Bill and Jenny. We provide our customers with knowledge. Our staff are so excited to share their years of experience of growing and selling trees, shrubs or vegetables that they are infectious. One of our staff named June helps young gardeners become confident enough to grow tomatoes or whatever for the first time. Because we have a US Contract Post Office customers come to My Garden during the seasonally quieter times and we work hard to make sure they purchase something. We have a small but amazing staff who make customers feel like they are visiting our home. The community doesn't just like us they LOVE us. They rave about us to friends, family and on the internet. Because Bill has a bankers background (25 years international investment banker) we are financially sound during a very difficult time.It is not because we have deep pockets. We actually started with empty pockets. My background in hard core retail from Eagle Hardware (Lowes)has given us the can-do retail basics that keep us on the right road and in the right direction at all times. We fundraise for two causes, breast cancer, and Alzheimer's and won the National award for charitable giving. As I re-read this it all seems very egotistical but we are proud of what we have accomplished during difficult times. Our difficult times go way beyond the weather but we stay focused and persevere. We have all worked very hard to be innovative and profitable.
Owners Bill Raynolds and Jenny Gunderson at a store party.
