I think you are making a mistake trying to be a designer and a retailer at the same time.

Any form of retail is a huge time sink. Someone has to be there whenever you are open. You fill in when someone doesn't show up. As the owner manager you have a lot of hats to wear.

My suggestion: Don't do retail. Or if you do, only open 1 day per week so that people can see samples. Get a place out of town. You need a couple acres for this.

To me, custom design has to take into account the space where the design fits. Which means calls on customers. Which takes you away from your business. And non-custom design container gardening strikes me as being little more than flower arranging.

An aspect of container gardening: Customers can re-arrange the containers easily. Perhaps you should consider teaching customers to be their own designer, and sell them the containers and plants to implement their design.

So this is the low level end of your trade. Sell plants. Instruct in their care. Run classes 2 evenings a week. Part of this is selling a line of containers -- and offer trade-ins on containers.

One of the concepts that the landscape design industry needs to over come:

Landscape is seen by many if not most people as static art -- like a painting or a sculpture. A better view is that it is a very slow performing art like a play or opera. Hard scape features are the 'set' But over the seasons different plants step forward to say their lines.

Example:

I used to sell windbreak and shelterbelt trees and tell people to plant them 8 to 12 feet apart. This meant a long wait while they got big enough to be effective. I warned people not to plant them too close. And had one customer who put white spruce 4 feet apart on both sides of his driveway. Black Canyon Drive.

A better approach in my not very humble opinion is to plan for the death/removal of plants. E.g. If you have only room for a single row of trees, alternate spruce and swedish aspen. The aspen give you something very quickly. The spruce take their time. Eventually the spruce will crowd the aspen, and you remove them for firewood.

Stage two: Rent entire container gardens for parties. Initially do this cheap: And have a card dispenser on every large contaienr. Wonderful publicity.

See if you can put containers with brochures at public places. Libraries, park entrances.

If you wanted to make out like a bandit with a container business go upscale: Suppose you had 10 customers with an average of 30 containers each. That's 300 containers total. You have 1000 containers. Once every two weeks you go by the customer and swap some containers. Not all of them every time. This is built in to the monthly maintenance fee. So as soon as the daffodils are starting to fade, you crew runs around and swaps the daffy containers for tulip containers. The daffies are grown on to recover for next year. Tulips are replaced with iris. Iris are replace with lilies. You have a show that constantly changes. Some pots would be there for the summer. Some year round. Bring special plants in for parties.

Have an extensive line of unique containers but make them so they fit standard nursery pots. The ornamental container stays at the customer's house. But one or more pots fit the container. This allows your customers to have truly custom look while many of your containers can be semi-standard.

While your crew is there, they check the automatic watering, deadhead as needed, check for thrips, vacuum up dead leaves and so on.

If the 12 hand bonsai jack pine is looking ragged, it's trimmed, or marked to be swapped next visit.

Restaurant patios are a large potential market. Offer a one month trial at a modest fee. The restaurant owner tracks patio occupancy and sales for two weeks before and after the trial, as well as during the trial. The plants take up room, but they give privacy, shade, and a very different ambiance. To do this you have to look into the restaurant at various times of day to see how close to full occupancy the patio is. Take pictures. You need them anyway to do your plan.

Sherwood Botsford
Sherwood's Forests Tree Farm
"Trees for Rural Living"
http://sherwoods-forests.com
sfinfo@sherwoods-forests.com
50042 Range Road 31, Warburg, AB
(780) 848 2548