Why garden center owners diversify to landscaping

Striving for success in the garden retail industry can often feel like a race to differentiate your business from the big box store on the other side of town, and in most cases, that comes down to the quality and variety of services you can provide that they can’t.

Knowing that, it’s no wonder why so many garden centers maintain florist departments, custom container stations and extensive giftware selections, to name a few offerings. But divisions devoted to the design, installation and maintenance of home landscapes seem to be growing at independent garden centers across the U.S. as a reliable revenue stream.

For some garden centers, landscaping is a secondary department that has grown in profitability in recent years, while for others, it represents the greatest opportunity for sustainable growth.

Rice’s Landscapes Redefined in Canton, Ohio, was a combination landscaper/retailer up until late 2017, when Owner Bryan Rice decided to shut down retail operations to focus exclusively on landscaping services. Rice says the decision came mostly from a place of wanting to return his focus to the company’s core strengths.

His grandfather started the business in 1941 with “very humble beginnings,” plowing gardens and doing light landscaping. As customers began to routinely stop by to purchase leftover plants and landscaping product from Rice’s, a small retail business took shape over the years, and Rice’s even started growing its own green goods. Growing and selling plants was a stable business, but it was taking up facility space that Rice eventually decided would better serve his company’s core landscaping mission.

“The big driver for us was really the growth of our maintenance business,” Rice says. “We actually needed more space for that maintenance business. We started looking at what’s growing and what’s not growing and we also looked at the margins and consistency of (growth).”

Read the full story from the June issue here.