How does your Garden.com grow?

Thu, 18 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Garden.com is cultivating an Internet start-up at Miracle-Gro speed -- and using some amusingly kitschy, if wasteful, marketing to seed the world with its brand.

Take the company business cards: They change every season to display a timely flower or fruit. Right now, they are brightened by a bold red tulip, but soon they will switch to a yellow sunflower for summer. In fall, Garden.com employees proffer pears and in winter, workers hand out an amaryllis, a holiday flower. Even summer interns are issued the other three seasons, a glitch that can't be fixed since the flowering quartet is printed en bloc.

The seasonal swing also goes for company letterhead and other mailings; stationery for the virtual garden center amounts to a literal mountain of dead trees. Not to be too environmentally incorrect, however -- the company does print its cards with soy-based ink on 30-percent-recycled translucent vellum.

Sundie Ruppert, Garden.com's art director, came up with the concept and defends the seasonal cards in the name of branding. "People who are gardeners get it," she says. "They want to collect all four." Passing out four -- when you can get by with one -- can't be good for the balance sheet.

Floppy with your Frappuccino?

Thu, 21 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Of all the places you might end up frittering away an afternoon over multiple cappuccinos reading the latest Barbara Kingsolver or debating the merits of Michael Jordan's retirement, Starbucks is probably not one of them. At best, the omnipresent coffee bar is a place to grab your cardboard cup of caffeine and split. And though a new Starbucks may stir the hearts of suburban moms who can finally get a decent decaf mocha in their local strip mall, there's a certain amount of anti-Starbucks backlash among urban dwellers -- who consider it their duty to favor neighborhood coffeehouses where the tables are worn smooth by many underemployed elbows.

But Starbucks has something new up its sleeve. It's called Circadia Coffee House, and it is already secretly charming the hip, anti-Starbucks types in San Francisco who want a place for their laptops and their lattes.

Salon.com > Deborah Claymon

How does your Garden.com grow?

Floppy with your Frappuccino?