From the Grower to Your Customer: A Behind-the-Scenes Visit to Willoway Nurseries
Updated: Nov 3
When a customer orders a plant from your garden center’s website, your reputation travels with it. How that plant is packed, shipped, and delivered matters just as much as the plant itself.
That’s what made our visit to Willoway Nurseries such a valuable final stop on The Garden Center Group annual conference tour. After visiting three garden centers, more than 200 retailers gathered at Willoway’s newly designed e-commerce warehouse for a firsthand look at its plant-shipping operation and dinner together inside the new facility. The Garden Center Group, owned by Danny and Karen Summers, supports independent garden centers across the country. This tour brought members together to learn from fellow retailers and see how a grower is helping them serve customers beyond their stores.
Following the plant from box to shipment
Willoway Nurseries, a participating supplier in E-Commerce Connect™ opened its doors to show retailers how it prepares plants for direct delivery. Members got a close look at Willoway’s new shipping boxes with a collapsible feature and followed the packing process down the conveyor belt, watching how plants were boxed, wrapped, and prepared for shipment. Seeing the process in person gave retailers a chance to understand the care behind each order and ask questions about how plants make the trip from the nursery to the customer.
For garden centers considering dropshipping, those details matter. It is one thing to hear that a supplier can ship plants. It is another to stand in the warehouse and watch how the work gets done.
Collapsible Shipping Boxes by Willoway Nurseries for E-Commerce Connect Members
A chance to experience the delivery themselves
Willoway also offered attending retailers a free plant shipped to their own garden center so they could experience the delivery firsthand. That offer takes the demonstration beyond the warehouse. Retailers can inspect the box when it arrives, unpack the plant, and evaluate its condition for themselves. They can see the presentation, protection, and care their own customers can expect when ordering Willoway plants through E-Commerce Connect™.
It gives retailers something concrete to evaluate before putting their name behind the experience.
Extending a trusted relationship online
Independent garden centers already depend on growers to supply quality plants for their stores. Dropshipping extends that relationship, with the grower fulfilling an online order directly to the retailer’s customer. Through E-Commerce Connect™, customers shop and pay on the garden center’s website, and participating suppliers ship eligible orders directly to them. The garden center remains the customer-facing business and keeps the customer relationship. For retailers, that creates practical opportunities: offering additional varieties without carrying every plant on-site, supplementing an assortment when store inventory runs low, and reaching customers beyond the local market, within each supplier’s shipping area.
The key is confidence in the supplier. Retailers need and want to understand who is handling the order and how that supplier will represent their business when the box reaches a customer’s door. Willoway’s demonstration truly helped make that connection clear.
A fitting finish to the tour...
The tour wrapped up with dinner and dessert at Willoway’s new warehouse....and a sweet treat it was... they had an ice cream machine! Members had time to catch up, compare notes, and share ideas from the day. After visiting three garden centers, this final stop brought the grower’s side of the story into focus, showing the care and preparation behind each shipment and how that work supports retailers serving customers both in-store and online.
Thank you to the Willoway Nurseries team for welcoming The The Garden Center Group, sharing your packing process, and giving retailers the opportunity to test the shipping experience themselves. And thank you to Danny and Karen Summers for bringing garden centers together to learn from one another at the Annual Fall Event in Cleveland Ohio. Every year garden centers from across the country meet to connect, collaborate and share best practices for the retail business. We were honored to share our program at this conference and for E-Commerce Connect™, the visit showed how important the supplier relationship is to selling plants online. Retailers could see the people, packaging, and process behind the shipment—and take that understanding back to their own businesses.
Learn more about The Garden Center Group: Interested in connecting with independent garden centers across the country? Visit The Garden Center Group to learn about its retailer community, business resources, and opportunities to learn and grow together.
