When I Win Power Ball Tonight, I’m Buying Thompson & Morgan

First, you need to know this: There are two Thompson & Morgan companies. One in the UK, the original, and one in the US and Canada, the portion of the company sold in 2009.

My story began at midnight last night as I was searching on-line for Phlox drummondii seed.

As for the US site, I have yet to hear anything, and I doubt that I will given how nothing appears in a full day search on Google, or on their social media which – honestly, is a great example of what social media should not look like. Sad, but true.One the venerable  British seed company founded in 1855 and now owned by Primary Capital who acquired the now profitable company in 2002, and then there is the US version of the seed company, a completely different business which was sold in 2009 to the mail order mega catalog company, Garden’s Alive. 

Yeah, that Garden’s Alive the mail order catalog with the ladybug on the logo? Got it.

What has happened still needs to be sorted out, but some things are clear – the British unit under the guidance and stewardship of its parent company has grown to become one of the largest, and most profitable seed companies in Europe, but something has gone fatally wrong with the US company, and some of us are trying to figure out what went wrong, and when.


Much appears to not be public, since Gardens Alive is a private company. Maybe they are working on restructuring the Thompson & Morgan brand, maybe they are recrafting the rather nonfunctional and unpopulated website, or more than likely, they are shopping the business around for anew buyer, but anyway one looks at it, the venture failed for any number of reasons, but why?


I have my theories. I assume that they bought the brand name and visual assets, but not the actual product? Or perhaps, just some of the product? (the seeds), since the US product lines were different, or highly edited from the UK and EU selections, but one thing is for certain – the US counterpart did not zig when it should have zagged – as the UK company grew in innovative ways, increasing varieties and choices, offering new plants not available anywhere else, clearly building a name for itself in a new world of gardeners, the US company slipped into what appeared to be a more generic seed company, with very little diversity or variety, two tenets that made the Thompson & Morgan name such a respected seed supplier years earlier.

Whether any of these theories are valid or not, I just can’t agree with what the Gardens Alive CEO Niles Kinerk stated as the cores reason why his seed catalogs are failing in the marketplace. All I can do is to guess at what the cause might be,  but I can make a few connections.  Given that Gardens Alive failed bid on acquiring the Park Seed Company catalog a few years ago, as well as the fact that the business owns many seed and plant catalog libraries, I would imagine that it seemed like a good idea to buy a well known and recognized name, maybe merge it with a few of the other content lists, much in the way that Target corp purchased the rights to the one-time popular horticultural lifestyle company Smith & Hawken. 

Mr. Kinerk was quoted on NPR’s Marketplace as saying “folks are not ordering from (his) Spring Hill Nurseries which has experienced losses over the past few years. The article states that it’s “a nationwide phenomenon that is decades in the making but came to a head in the great recession.” We can’t deny that the recession has affected sales of many things, but other business have proven that plants not only have sold well, but that some niche companies increased their sales. But why? I’m not buying that it’s just because people don’t garden, or because business loans are harder to get. 

Kinerk also added, “People’s sizes of yards are getting smaller. Two-income families have less time. Gardening takes time.”

This may be true, but the problem, or challenge may indeed be more like this – although there are more people gardening today, they can be divided into two groups, both somewhat informed. Group 1 likes value, but finds this value at the big box store garden centers, the ‘Lowes’ and ‘Home Depot’s’ of the world, where a 1 quart container plant grown from a plug or a sleeve (terms for rooted cuttings. micro-propagated or pre-started plants developed at mega wholesale nursery research labs, grown often overseas in plugs, then grown-on at local in-between liner growers, and then distributed to the retailer in pre-arranged contracts under branded names like Miracle-Gro, or Proven Winners.

This model keeps local, independent nurseries out of the picture, thus threatening a segment of the business, so yes – many middle sized nurseries, once successfully scratching by with local sales, going under with the larger and well-marketed competition – those spring Lowes commercials with dancing hoses, happy young couples and carpets of color, all crafted by a national team of merchandisers, marketers and local buyers.

On the other hand, there is this ‘other’ audience, I’ll say ‘us’. Folks who demand more, who will search for the specialist nursery, be they mail order or local. This leads us to the few, but successful niche grower – Plant Delights Nursery, Annies Annuals, and those sort of places we all know and love. For now, they are successful because they carry what others won’t. Plant breeders know this, we know this, and home gardeners who care, know this – that some great coreopsis being bred right now, will never be propagated by one of the large, Dutch wholesalers simply because it is too tall for the shelves at retail, or too tall for the shelves on the trucks that deliver to retail. True story.

 The article about the struggles of Gardens Alive goes on to touch on other challenges for the mail order nursery business, citing economic factors as a key problem. This is what Marketplace referred to as “America’s relationship with it’s gardens and plants” as a changing one. The article makes the point that ” fewer people now grow their own food.”.

Really?

I find that hard to believe. I mean, sure, if we are measuring this to 1945, or 1965, but today, this tide of ‘home gardeners’ has definitely shifted. 

Sure, OK – – many large-scale nurseries have been forced to close, especially generalist wholesale nurseries, and a good number of the, well, let’s call them the average, ‘mom and pop growers. The small, backyard or hoop house “we only grow pansy’s, impatiens and tomato plant” growers”.

 There is no denying that managing a nursery during a period of economic challenge so experienced today, is tough, but much of these factors are obvious, yet some nurseries are not only surviving, they are thriving.  My point it, this argument has two sides.

Let’s look at the mail order company also owned by Garden’s Alive, Spring Hill Nursery as an example.

We all grew up with this catalog, and I would bet anything that many of us first became interested in gardening by ordering from this, or even a Gurney’s catalog back ‘in the daySpring Hill is not special, it’s not fancy or even that respected by horticulturists. It’s audience is more likely to be the same consumer who played Publishers Clearing House than one that ordered from White Flower Farm, or Wayside Nursery. It’s basically the plant equivalent of a dollar store combined with that of Wal Mart, not necessarily a dumb idea,  I suppose, but it’s got to be hard today to be this, ordinary. Apparently, the consumer feels the same way.

Back toThompson & Morgan US, and it’s apparent failure – is it failing because of what the Gardens Alive management says? That “American’s don’t have time to garden anymore?”  Nah, I don’t buy that. 

I believe that the answer is pretty obvious – So, let’s just say it together – –  Once the Thompson & Morgan catalog became ‘American’ and ordinary? The  serious gardener stopped ordering from it. We all stopped ordering from it for the same reason why we never ordered from Spring Hill Nursery – we know that we don’t want an bare root ‘anything’ in a poly bag. The varieties offered in the new American Thompson & Morgan, were available in most other seed catalogs. We weren’t ‘convinced that anything was special.

It’s just a different world today. Quality wins out, as does selection.

It so happens that that Marketplace article illuminated this problem as well, but I don’t believe that it was intentional. The author, Sabri Ben-Achour, wrote about his visit to the greenhouses at Spring Hill, and his experience summed up what the problem was: “Through what seem like endless rows of blood-red sedum, glowing pink coral bells, and lush vining clematis – Coolers were filled with grub-like arisaema tubers, and phlox roots that tumbled through conveyor belts and packing machines into bags of peat moss.”

Yyyyeah, that’s the nursery we want to order from? Rrrright.

This sort of mass-bare-root dormant nursery stock may have worked as a business model 20 or 30 years ago, but today this type of big ‘Farma’ only results in disillusionment. People want plants that are in bloom, or in bud when they shop at the garden center. When they get a dried bare root anything, they go onto Daves Garden.com and they rant.

 As for the rest of us? We’re not that kind of consumer, we are even worse. 

So is there an audience for the novelty and cheep? Of course there is, but I would argue that they are glued to their TV flat screens  watching someone shlep tuberose tubers on the Home Shopping Network rather then flipping through paper catalogs. Surely orders keep pouring in for  3.99 Tree Tomatoes and Ozark strawberries, but return visits are unlikely. 

This does leave the UK Thompson & Morgan skyrocketing to new stardom. I can only hope that they begin shipping to the US soon, for I desperately miss their selection. As the US side of Thompson & Morgan, the end, may actually be here already. They have not updated their website, and no one is returning calls, or inquiries about the future of the business.

So, a quick recap – you should know up front, that Thompson & Morgan, at least the
company you once knew and loved, still exists in the UK, but the North American company ( and I think, the Canadian) company was sold off to Gardens Alive. The brand on this side of the Atlantic joined their ever-growing portfolio of horticultural and home lifestyle mail-order brands, that I listed above.

 

The US site is surprisingly out of stock of most everything. Clearly, something was up here, but now, it’s all beginning to make sense.

I will admit that over the past year, I’ve been secretly
stalking  Michael Perry
(@gardening_greek), a studly, bearded New Product Development Manager based in
the UK office, for this, the ‘better side’ of the Thompson & Morgan
company.  Perry, who is clearly more millennial
focused as well as is a legitimate plantsman himself (aside from being as
ridiculously attractive as Disney’s ‘Galahad’), is clearly a smart move for
T&M. Not only is he a plant hunter, looking for trends in the horticultural
world, he is also very active in social media, being a spokesperson to a new
generation of gardeners without being just a flower-arranging blogger (say what?).
He’s young, hip, and he makes the brand more-than-relevant to this new,
emerging audience who purportedly ‘doesn’t’ have time to garden’. There are
youtube videos, plenty of chat on Facebook, and definitely a good use of
Twitter aside from his musings on his blog, PlanthunterUK.

As for the British growth company, who aquired the British portion of Thompson & Morgan, it clearly knew what to do with this investment. After growing the business, it’s now getting ready to sell it, clearly with a profit, but this is not a bad thing.  T&M is a company which has been turned around by its
current owner, Primary Capital , who announced in August, 2015 that it is now
offering to sell the company, who in a statement said: that it has “Improved
performance and revitalized profitability”, and most promising perhaps, “In
recent years, the company has consolidated its market leading position, with e-commerce
revenue being over twice that of its nearest competitor. May 2015 saw a record
1.7 million visits to the T&M website.”.

And no one is gardening anymore? Right.