A focus on multichannel merchandising has been a winning strategy for Charleston Gardens.
Written By KIMBERLY RODGERS
Photography By SARAH GLENN
Many people ask Leeda Marting if she started her business, Charleston Gardens®, because she loves gardening. Surprisingly, her answer is no. Marting began her successful retail operation in 1994 after she completed considerable market research on the lifestyle and spending habits of the baby-boom generation.
“There was some very interesting research that showed gardening would be a top pastime for people over 50,” Marting says. While she enjoyed plants, Marting came to the conclusion that the horticulture component of gardening was not the business for her. Plants are a commodity, and people can go to big-box stores to buy them.
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| Located just outside the historic district, Charleston Gardens Catalog Outlet is a popular destination for both local residents and tourists. |
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| Wayne Arnold, store manager |
Instead, Marting chose to focus on home furnishings and accessories—the other key elements of the boomer gardening lifestyle—as her niche. “The name Charleston Gardens is horticulturally related, but has nothing to do with horticulture,” she says. “The business is home furnishings and the specialty is outdoors.”
Marting first began her business with a traditional retail store in historic Charleston, S.C. Although she had lived in New York City for many years, Marting is a Southerner by birth and had long admired the beautiful homes and entertaining gardens that typify the city.
She accurately predicted that Charleston would be a perfect fit for her business, in location and in name. In late 1995, a year after she opened her retail operation, Marting debuted the Charleston Gardens mail-order catalog. In 1998, she launched her Web site (www.charlestongardens.com).
Today, through all three merchandising channels, Charleston Gardens gives customers throughout the nation the chance to create a comfortable and inviting lifestyle for their outdoor spaces, reflecting the gracious Southern lifestyle. In fact, the largest market for the mail-order catalog is California.
In early 2003, Marting closed her traditional retail storefront, consolidating her brick-and-mortar operations into the Charleston Gardens Catalog Outlet (located just outside the city’s historic district). The space features high-end outdoor furnishings, upscale garden accessories and an array of gift items. It is an ideal venue for selling product samples (those being considered for the catalog and Web site), overstocked items from previous catalogs and slightly blemished merchandise at reduced prices.
“The store has a constantly evolving range of items and it changes every week,” Marting says. “We have very tough standards, and the outlet gives us a chance to make sure the product samples we receive meet our requirements before we put them in the catalog or on the Web site.” The outlet also provides a convenient backdrop for shooting many of the product photographs that go into the Web site and catalog.
The merchandising strategy for an outlet is different from that for a traditional retail store. In a conventional stand-alone store, multiple units of an item are not displayed. In an outlet, products are often stacked, not tucked away in a cabinet or back room for storage.
Marting says, “The outlet looks good, but because the merchandise is changing and moving constantly, the look is not as clean.” She adds, however, that the products’ diversity attracts customers; they come back to the store repeatedly because they know they’ll always find something different.
Enthusiastically supported by the local community, the store is also popular with the crowds of tourists who visit Charleston each year. In fact, many out-of-towners visit the outlet store because they are catalog customers. Marting says that all three of her sales venues—outlet store, national mail-order catalog and Web site—support and positively feed into each other. “This concept of being a multichannel merchant is what we’re all about and, in my opinion, is what everybody in retail has got to be about,” she says.
Marting believes that it is crucial for independent retailers to have a Web site. “You can get away without having a mail-order catalog, but you must have a Web site,” she says. Marting adds that a Web site for an independent business can support the core business through mailings, promotions and other special offers, along with providing product information.
For Charleston Gardens, its hugely successful national catalog (with a mailing list of approximately 500,000 per quarter) is its core business. “The catalog generates sales on the Internet,” Marting says. “It is the impetus.” The mail-order catalog is crucial to Charleston Gardens because of its main demographic: the older, suburban, affluent married woman.
This demographic, for years, had been most comfortable and familiar with catalog shopping, not with using the Internet to order merchandise. “The Internet was mainly a place men used to order their computer equipment,” she says. “It you look at the statistics on the use of the Internet by women, it is very recent.”
Marting continues, “Originally, our Web page was more of an information site. It was a way to receive catalog requests and generate foot traffic for the store.” Today, the Charleston Gardens Web site has evolved into a place where customers can choose from well over a thousand products.
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| Outlet shoppers will find an array of high-end outdoor furniture groupings, along with gardenrelated accessories and gifts. |
“Our Internet sales are increasing, and we’re tracking how many people find us,” she says. While Marting says that Internet use by females has significantly grown in the past five years, the catalog, for now, will remain her nucleus. “The catalog will often drive people to the Web site,” she explains.
Charleston Gardens advertises in many different outlets, including the Internet search engine Google, national garden and horticulture magazines and local and national newspapers. “We also receive a lot of editorial placement, which is generated from press mailings we do with every new catalog,” she says. The company manages all marketing and advertising efforts internally and does not employ an outside agency.
Marting also recently wrote a book, “Creating Outdoor Rooms,” which provides ideas and inspiration. It is illustrated with 150 color photographs taken in Charleston’s historic homes and gardens.
Public relations is a somewhat easy effort for Charleston Gardens, primarily because the region is known for its hospitality and charm. “We are fortunate to rely on the enormous good will of many people in Charleston who open up their beautiful homes for photography when we need an outdoor setting,” she says. “We’ve been here for so many years that we’ve been able to build a real relationship with the community.”
Marting is looking toward the future for her booming company and foresees a possible trend in the way outdoor collections are sold. “I think we are going to see a more eclectic approach to outdoor furnishings,” she says. “People are going to feel more comfortable mixing their outdoor pieces just as they do now with their indoor rooms.”
PHPR May/June 2008
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