The houzz.com slideshow below has some tremendous ideas for Fall container plantings. Preparing and selling pre-planted containers such as these can be an especially great way for independent garden centers to separate themselves from the big boxes, as this is a level of service that just can’t be scaled. While most of the pots shown in the slides aren’t ours, we do have very similar items to most of them on hand for quick shipment.

Imagine what a difference it would make in your garden to switch out earth-toned pots that blend in with the background with containers that visually pop in shades of blue, red, orange or even purple. Colorful containers can be used in many ways to stand out and grab our attention in outdoor spaces — often where it’s more challenging to add color. Not all of the pots shown in the article are ours, but we’ve got similar ones available – remember that it’s the concepts and colors that are most important, not the specific planters.

If you’ve been paying even the slightest amount of attention to your social media accounts over the past few months, you will have noticed that the succulent trend of the past few years has transformed and blossomed into a fully-fledged resurrection of the houseplant craze of the 70’s and 80’s.

As with most trends, the houseplant revolution took root on the coasts, and is making rapid inroads towards the center of the country. Retail consumers (especially young, apartment-dwelling ones) are driven by the health benefits, the portability, and the affordability of houseplants; they are a super-easy way for your customers to make an impact on a living space, and make great gifts.

Even if you cater mostly to more established, home-owning consumers, you can still capitalize on this style shift, although you might also want to carry a selection of larger houseplants – we are seeing a big increase in sales of larger saucers this year, indicating that consumers aren’t just interested in small “starter” houseplants.

That this market shift is occurring is great news for just about everyone involved in the garden industry – houseplant sales aren’t seasonal in nature, and can help drive year-round profitability for your garden center.

Over the past few years, retailers who embraced succulents have seen sales spike in related categories as well, as consumers shopped for specialty soils, watering cans, fertilizers, and most importantly (from our perspective, anyway), pottery. We fully expect that the same thing will happen for garden centers who have the foresight to latch onto the houseplant craze as well.

We recommend that you include a range of planters in your Spring stocking order to ensure that you’re ready for consumer demand – hanging baskets, self-watering planters, pots with attached saucers, bonsai planters, and small pots with matching saucers are all good add-ons to your outdoor pottery offerings.

If you’d like to read more on the impact that houseplants are having on our industry, The December issue of Green Profit Magazine includes several perspectives on the growth in this market, and is worth a read.

Based on the volume of questions that we field from our customers, deciding how to price out a set of flower pots is one of the more difficult tasks facing garden center management today.

There are a lot of approaches to accomplishing this task, and different solutions will often work for different garden centers, or even for different products within the same garden center. In many ways, pricing planters is more of an art than a science, but there are some basic concepts that will help to get you started, and at least one rule that you should never break:

• The biggest key to successfully pricing your pots is to make sure that the prices for each piece are proportionally and logically  related to the actual size and scale of each pot included in the set. The easiest way to do this is to use a simple formula to establish ballpark prices. We use the following to power the Unit Price Calculator on our website – Please note that the steps below will work either before or after your margin calculations:
• Each pot in the set is assigned a numerical value, with 1 being the smallest pot, 2 being the 2nd smallest, 3 being the 3rd smallest, and so forth.
• These numerical unit values are then added together – a three-pot set would have a total unit count of 6, for example (1+2+3=6). Similarly, a four-pot set would total 10 units (1+2+3+4=10).
• You then divide the cost of the set by the set’s total unit count – A three-pot set with a cost of $60.00 would be divided by 6 per the example above, resulting in a unit cost of $10.00.
• This unit cost is then multiplied by the total number of units assigned to an individual pot, so our $60.00 set with an individual unit cost of $10.00 results in per-pot benchmark prices of $10.00 (1 x $10.00), $20.00 (2 x $10.00), & $30.00 (3 x $10.00).
• If you don’t feel like doing the math by hand, we have an easy-to-use downloadable Excel calculator on our website.

Don’t be afraid to second-guess the results from the formula, as many times it will make sense to adjust the weighting of the prices – most often reducing the price of the smallest pot while adding to the cost of the largest pot(s), which tend to be less price-sensitive at retail.

One of the great things about the pottery category is that it offers a lot of opportunity for enhancing your margin dollars. It’s perfectly fine to raise your prices beyond what the formula dictates if you feel that a particular pot can support a higher price –  If a pot looks like a $79.00 item to you, but the formula says that it should be a $59.00 pot, charge the higher price – you can always discount away from it if needed.

Finally, the only hard and fast rule in this process is that you should never, ever, simply divide the cost of a set by the number of pots in the set. This  overly-simple solution always leads to retail prices that don’t make sense, as you wind up with large and small pots sitting on your shelves at the same price.

Check out this cool post from Houzz.com about potting stations. Of course, we suggest using our pots instead of the ones pictured in the article, but as a general rule, we are fully in favor of home improvement projects that result in more pots being filled with dirt and plants.