Marketing & Communications Supervisor, Ecommerce
Proven Winners Direct by Four Star Greenhouse
Proven Winners Direct was started by longtime wholesale greenhouse company Four Star Greenhouse, which is a partner of the national Proven Winners plant brand.
Our team at Proven Winners Direct was tasked with selling live plants directly to consumers online for the first time. As the company grew, it became a first-party seller with major online retailers such as Amazon, The Home Depot and QVC. During my time with the company, sales dollars doubled each year, reaching multi-millions.
Product Content Management
As the leader of our marketing efforts, I worked closely with the team to establish standards and styles on product pages for up to 1,000 live plants and accessories.
Based on each online retailers' rules, we optimized the product photos, videos, titles, bullets and descriptions to best sell the products with one consistent brand and voice.
Using constant customer feedback, online merchant advice and analysis of sales data, we updated product pages regularly to enhance the shopping experience, especially ahead of the spring season. This involved tedious tracking and editing efforts to ensure the details were correct on 1,000 pages across at least three online retail platforms.
Our content decisions were influenced by customers' in-person retail plant shopping experience. Understanding how the customers often looked at plant tags in person and chose the healthiest plants with the most buds influenced the photos and copy we added, such as a scan of the plant tag and a description of how our trained shippers chose and packaged the best plants from our greenhouses. As we anticipated customers would be nervous about live plants being shipped in a box, we included as much information as possible about the specially designed and tested packaging.
Establishing Brand
Selling plants online was a new venture and involved several experiments to develop the best shopping experience for consumers. This was a collaborative process where we worked closely, not only with our wholesale teams in-house, but also externally with national online merchants to help establish these products in the online shopping world.
As a Proven Winners partner, we were fortunate to have access to extensive branding resources, including photography and plant information. When the existing marketing materials didn’t meet our unique online needs, we shot thousands of our own photos, hundreds of videos and wrote thousands of product descriptions to best portray the products for the customers.
Online merchants at both Amazon and The Home Depot told us we were setting the gold standard for selling plants online. They said no one was using their enhanced product page features like we were, a project I personally started and oversaw. Along with leadership of Proven Winners Direct, I worked closely with the merchants, which included visiting the online retailers' headquarters at least once a year.
Expanding to QVC with Martha Stewart
Our work started to get noticed by other major online retailers and brands. A buyer with QVC became interested in our products for their TV and online sales. They had recently partnered with Martha Stewart, who was looking for a plant seller to complement her many products.
I was closely involved with several new business efforts and meetings with QVC, including in-person meetings with Martha Stewart and her team in New York City. This led to arranging an on-air and online promotion with QVC and Martha Stewart for April 2018. We worked closely with Martha Stewart's team and QVC to create co-branded materials, grow on-air plants, write on-air talking points and provide online product photos, titles and other product information.
Martha Stewart airing on QVC promoting Proven Winners plant combinations with co-branded tags, pot wraps and boxes that we designed in collaboration with her team and QVC.
