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  Top-notch display gardens like this grass garden play an enormous role in Matterhorn's ability to draw customers from a large area. | |||||
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By Carol Miller Matterhorn Nursery's success is an anomaly. It sits on pricey real estate, yet devotes many acres to display gardens. In addition to the vast gardens, it expects customers to navigate 30 buildings. It will even take a few acres out of play for a couple of years to build a new display garden. That sort of thing just isn't done here in America. Except at Matterhorn, and it draws in customers to the tune of $3 million, retail, per year. The lure of an educated consumer For those of us who attend industry events, Matt Horn, owner of Matterhorn Nursery, is a familiar presence. You can see him with his notepad and pen, scribbling notes even on the third day of a grueling tour. It's hard to believe he didn't open his retail store until 1996. Horn began his horticulture career as a wholesaler to landscapers (and still is today). He allowed local residents to buy his product at retail rates, although he didn't have a true store set up. The difference between the two customer groups was striking. "We found a lot of the landscapers didn't listen to us about our plants. They were in it for the quick dollar, and just wanted to buy cheap and sell high," Horn said. "The homeowners, they read a lot, were highly educated -- they often know a lot more than we sometimes do -- and didn't mind paying a higher price for a quality plant." Once he noticed that pattern, deciding to focus on a retail store was an easy decision. Horn spent two years researching and preparing before opening in 1996. The village concept, Matterhorn style Due to the amount of land it sits on and its multiple buildings, Matterhorn looks more like a small community than a traditional garden center. "We've always had a village concept, but not like New Garden," Horn said, referring to a garden center in South Carolina that partners with compatible companies that have their own shops on New Garden's turf. "Our concept was to run the village itself, rather than bring in other businesses." There are more than 30 buildings at Matterhorn, each one housing a different department. There's the birding pavilion, the book shop, the aquatics store. The format can be difficult to shop and work, but the ambiance is so appealing that customers seem to enjoy wading through the different departments. "It's difficult to man all these areas, so a lot of them have a self-help format. A lot of signs," Horn said. "Signage has always been a big thing for us. We're not great, but we're working on it." The Matterhorn staff has also developed an impromptu seminar technique to handle multiple customers. "The aquatic area is our biggest area by far and can get really busy. If I have one customer asking questions with six more waiting, I'll ask everyone to come in and we'll have a question and answer session," Horn said. One way Matterhorn takes some of the customer demand off of its staff is how-to and educational handouts. The handouts cover a huge range of topics. "We table all questions asked of us, and at year's end, we'll see the most commonly asked questions," Horn said. "So we have over 100 guides, about pruning clematis, organic gardening, etc." The handouts play an important role in Matterhorn's local reputation as the best source for gardening advice. For a store off the beaten path like Matterhorn, a reputation is vital to financial growth. "I would say that is the key. We do everything we can to defend that reputation. Beside the handouts, we have qualified horticulturists at our registers who can answer questions and add in tie-in sales," Horn said. Water issues New York suffered a drastic drought in 2002. Even when there is plenty of rain, Horn still worries. "There has been such poor usage planning around here that if we go for two or three weeks without rain, we're in major trouble," Horn said. As a result, he is doing everything he can in his community to improve matters. "We've always been ecologically minded. It's just a common sense issue," Horn said. "We have a whole drought-tolerant guide, what you can do in the drought, can't do, how to lessen the hurt. We sell drip irrigation, aqua gels and mycorrhizal fungi. We make sure we sell Treegators with each tree sold. We're teaching people how to water, what can live with less water, what can't." Matterhorn used to hold a lot of water-issue seminars, but cut back on them since interest waned a little because the botanical gardens were meeting that need. "We're going to go back to 20-minute walking tours, working with a schedule that coincides with tasks in the garden centers," Horn said. "I think we'll have better luck with on-site talks rather than showing slides."
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