Inspiration & cases

Almost everyone in the garden industry has seen letters like this: you published a photo on your website and suddenly receive a letter asking you to prove that you have a valid licence for it. If you can’t, you’re presented with a settlement demand that can easily be $600 or more for a single photo.

Adding plants to a webshop sounds easy. Until you actually have to do it. A supplier sends you an Excel file with 800 plant names. Some products already exist in your Shopify store, others don’t. Descriptions are missing, photos come from different sources and half of the products have little more than a price and a Latin name. Sounds familiar?

Our ’26 survey among 668 consumers showed that 73% of the consumers decided not to buy a plant due to a lack of information. And that’s not a surprise, since garden center websites are not really helping customers to find a plant. If someone searches for Hydrangea, Lavender or Hosta, they will usually get some summarised information and generic tips.

When a plant wins an award at one of the industry’s leading trade shows, everyone wants to talk about it. Growers share the news, garden centers want to promote the winner and marketing teams start thinking about newsletters, social media posts, product pages and in-store signage. That enthusiasm can quickly disappear, however, when nobody has a suitable photo or the plant cannot yet be found in the company’s database.

Would you spend $20 on a product if you don’t know what to do with it? I guess not. But that’s exactly what we expected from customers in a garden center. The lack of accessible information can be surprising in garden centers, and if available, it’s often hidden on a small label.

Whenever we talk with garden centres and nurseries about AI, it’s only a matter of time before the fluorescent blue Hosta is mentioned. Customers see these AI-generated photos on Etsy or Amazon and are looking for the same plant in your store. And guess what: you don’t have it, since it’s very obviously a fake plant. But what’s the story behind these sellers on Etsy and Amazon? And what’s the role of AI in this scam?

May is one of the busiest and most commercially important months of the year for garden centers. Yet new consumer research suggests that many sales may be lost at the bench, simply because customers do not have enough clear plant information at the moment they are ready to buy.

In today's digital age, online reviews are not just feedback but a powerful tool that you can leverage to understand customer sentiment and improve services. As you accumulate thousands of reviews across various platforms, manually analyzing them becomes an unfeasible task.

Many foreigners from the industry have been visiting Dutch garden centres and noticed pallets with soft drinks stacked in a corner and wondered how that was working, practically and financially. Why would you do that? What’s the added value to your business? And are customers buying it?

Colleague Jen Polanz recently chatted with someone hoping to help you solve your plant photo and description issues using the power of AI. Here’s what she gathered from her conversation.