Floral Plant Growers, headquartered in Denmark, Wis., is taking on more specialty plant production, including color bowls, finished in a variety of specialty containers. The work has proven challenging and labor intensive, but profitable.

The company's latest endeavor, growing Kmart's Martha Stewart Everyday Garden line of plants, was a risky business venture. But Floral Plant Growers considers this program a success, too.

"Don't get us wrong, flats continue to be the core of our business and very important," said company president Bruce Daniel. "But specialty plants continue to take up a larger portion of our product mix and that percentage increases every year."

The Wisconsin location was formerly owned by Greiling Farms. In the early 1990s, the Greiling family began to change the facility's focus to finished material and Floral Plant Growers bought the greenhouses in 1998. Plugs and prefinished material still make up 20 percent of the product mix, but the majority of sales are now "retail-ready" plants sold to mass-market and home-improvement chains.

These customers are demanding specialty plants and large patio planters. They're good late-season items that consumers buy on impulse. Growers willing to produce them can make healthy returns, as quality specialty plants and planters still command good wholesale prices.

Container mania

Plants leaving Floral Plant Growers are now likely to be in moss or biodegradable baskets, 14-inch terra-cotta bowls or 12-inch square forest-green containers. Ten to 12 container types, shapes and colors are in the company's Instant Beauty line of plants; this number increases every year.

"They're popular with consumers who want something to look attractive right away," Daniel said. "We're also seeing a shift toward people wanting larger containers of things they're going to plant in their gardens. They want 4-, 5- and 6-inch annuals instead of packs and they'll pay more to have impact on day one rather than four to five weeks away."

One major disadvantage with growing in specialty containers is that they aren't compatible with many of the company's automated systems, such as its Flier plug transplanter lines.

"You want to use the transplanters whenever possible, but many of the specialty containers don't lend themselves to this automation. Plus, we're using more vegetative material in specialty containers and they often don't work well with the transplanters either," said Dean Chaloupka, vice president of sales and operations. "We plan ahead to know what labor will be involved in the upcoming season so we can accurately price our products and have enough people on hand."

Bowl 'em over

Mixed bowls are a popular portion of the Instant Beauty line. These products are carefully planned a season in advance.

"We just don't throw them together at the last minute," Chaloupka said. "Just putting plants together doesn't necessarily give you the right look. You have to get a good visual appeal and that involves color combinations, plant heights and their dimensions."

Floral Plant Growers has several seasoned employees entrusted with creating new mixed bowl combinations. In addition to looks, these designers must take into account sunlight, moisture and fertilizer needs of combined plants.

Each fall, customers are sent photos or samples of new designs for evaluation and the customers' feedback determines what is produced the following spring.

Tastes among Floral Plant Growers' customers tend to be somewhat similar when it comes to plants. All seem to like the same combinations and prefer trendy colors. Tastes differ though, when it comes to containers.

"The container is where each customer wants uniqueness from their competition," Daniel said. "One company may want a different color, like a dark-green or granite vs. terra cotta, or a different size, like a 16-inch instead of a 14. This means managing more SKUs, but that's the choice you make when you deal with these types of customers."

A good thing

This was the first year Kmart sold the Martha Stewart Everyday Garden line of specialty plants. Floral Plant Growers was one of few growers chosen to produce them. A great deal of risk was involved in taking on this new program, but the challenge paid off.

"We have a good 20-year working relationship with Kmart, going back to the Greiling days," Daniel said. "We were very proud to be asked to produce these plants because not all suppliers were picked."

The program included more than 200 annual and perennial varieties grown in pint, quart and 12-inch containers and 10- and 12-inch baskets. To deliver the quantity of plants Kmart wanted, Floral Plant Growers had to dedicate a great deal of greenhouse space, which is something no grower wants to do for one customer, much less one product line.

"Any time there is a new program, such as this on this scale, you expect problems," Chaloupka said. "We expected some rough bumps and we were not too surprised when they happened because we were open minded going into it. Kmart is a large, important customer so we knew we had to come through."

One challenge was that Floral Plant Growers had never grown many of the 200 varieties involved with the Martha Stewart line, such as Arctotis, also known as African daisy. With many varieties, production crews were unfamiliar with propagation, soil requirements, preferred light levels and moisture and fertilizer rates.

Another unforeseen problem was the large Horticultural Printers tags included in the program. They were so large, in fact, that they limited available sunlight to young plants and production crews had to adjust to correct this problem.

Employees make it work

In the end, Floral Plant Growers is pleased with how the first season with the Martha Stewart line turned out.

"We got the product to the market when it was required. They haven't told us how successful the program was on the retail level, but we met our commitments to them," Daniel said. "And they took everything we had. That's not always the case with other customers when they ask you to take on something like this. It's frustrating when that happens because you can't sell these products to any other customers."

Producing the line was a huge project for six months. It took dedication from all employees for the program to succeed. "We had to get the message out to our employees how important this was to us," Chaloupka said. "We let them all know in the company newsletter last fall what we were doing and the efforts it would take from all of us to pull it off. The only way for something like this to work is for everyone on the team to know what it means to the company."

Floral Plant Growers Location: Denmark, Wis. Founded: As Greiling Farms in 1972. Was purchased by Floral Plant Growers in 1998. Production space: 62 acres of greenhouse production, 8 acres of outdoor production. Employees: 250, but can increase to 550 seasonally. Products: 80 percent finished "retail-ready" plants, 20 percent "grower-ready" plugs and prefinished plants. Crops: Spring bedding plants, summer perennials, fall mums and poinsettias. Retail customers: Mass marketers and home improvement chains in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and North Central United States. For more: Floral Plant Growers, P.O. Box 790, Denmark, WI 54208; (920) 863-2107; fax (920) 863-8386.

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