Rose Sales Burst Into Bloom
In gardens across Southern California, a prickly ground cover, filled with Energizer Bunny-pink blooms, is suddenly everywhere.
Thanks to a marketing blitzkrieg rarely seen in the gentle gardening industry, it’s proliferating in patio pots, dangling from baskets, advancing over stretches along the freeways, charging up hillsides.
The plant--a rosebush of utilitarian purpose and modest looks--goes by a trade name more befitting an indoor-outdoor rug. Flower Carpet, its promoters claim, answers the baby boomer’s desire for a rose garden like her mom’s, minus the hassle.
Boosters say the high-tech hybrid resists most pests, endures most climes, and doesn’t demand the careful pruning that many roses do.
“In essence, here’s a rose for dummies,” said Dan Davids, president of Flower Carpet USA in Gardena, who holds the U.S. license to grow and market the German-bred plant.
Davids said he and the nurseries he licenses sold more than 2 million plants nationwide during Flower Carpet’s debut year through last August. “It’s the biggest single plant release ever,” he said.
Though industry sales data is hard to come by, gardening experts tend to agree with him.
“It’s the biggest fanfare for a rose since the Peace rose of 1945,” said Stu Span, a veteran salesman at Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar. He recalls how a cream-colored flower smuggled out of Nazi-held France later spurred the rose industry’s postwar boom.
Backyard stores, mass retailers and nurseries across Southern California report that Flower Carpet enjoyed big--and sometimes record--sales for a plant in its introductory year. And competitors have rushed to ape the success.
Still, some rose aficionados say the plant itself hasn’t lived up to the hype. As Davids aims to boost the variety’s sales by offering a version with white blossoms next season, Flower Carpet now must prove itself in gardens across the country.
The plant’s promoters have taught an industry known for pushing its product with no more savvy than a farm stand about the possibilities of Madison Avenue-type marketing.
Unlike its rivals, the plant clearly makes a statement on the retail shelf.
Sold in a pink pot, with a fertilizer packet and easy-instruction booklet, it blazes like a smoggy sunset over competitors in standard dark containers with barely readable tags. Cost: $13.95 to $16.99. Patti Robinson, a saleswoman at Kmart in Tustin, tells of one middle-aged man who has bought at least 50 of the plants for his hilly yard.
“Every time he comes in, he gets a basket of roses and off he goes,” Robinson said. “He loves them. They’re very easy care. You fertilize once every six months, and they just grow like crazy.”
Davids promoted Flower Carpet with a campaign of unprecedented scope for one piddling plant, say gardening industry experts. He won’t disclose his budget, but allows he hired advertising and public relations firms.
They helped him pitch the plant as an environmentally friendly “eco-rose” that thrives without pesticides. He took ads in magazines ranging from Better Homes & Gardens to Sunset. He said he even made sure influential gardening writers each got plants for their very own, he said.
Sales proliferated.
Roger’s Gardens sold 4,000 plants for the spring season alone--unprecedented volume for a new plant, management said.
Azusa-based Monrovia Nursery Co., one of two licensed growers in the Southland, sold 500,000 plants to wholesalers nationwide--25% more than expected. “It’s the most successful launch we’ve ever had,” said Gilbert Resendez, a vice-president. The American Rose Society, a Shreveport, La., organization of more than 23,000 rose enthusiasts, got calls from members across the country who had read about the variety in their local newspapers and wanted to know where to buy some, said Darlene Kamperman, an administrative assistant.
“That cute little pink pot they come in caught everyone’s eye,” she said. Competitors responded with promotions of their own low-growing roses.
Irvine, for instance, is home to El Modeno, a licensed grower of Flower Carpet. El Modeno’s rival across the street, Hines Wholesale Nursery, last spring introduced a low-growing shrub rose called Ivory Carpet.
Jane Manson, Hines’ manager of sales administration, said the company also began sending press releases to gardening writers to boost consumer awareness of its products.
“Before we just let it happen,” she said. “We let the market discover our products through the nursery. Now we are trying to make the consumer more aware of the product upfront, so they can go into the nursery and ask for it.”
Some rose purists turned up their noses at a plant whose masses of blossoms on short stems would never do for a Valentine’s Day bouquet. And fragrance?
There’s none. “We want to have our gardens so people can walk around in them, pick flowers for bouquets,” said Linda Renner, president of the Orange County Rose Society. “When people see a rose, they want to smell it--and they’re disappointed when there’s no fragrance.”
Of bigger concern in Flower Carpet’s future are reports that the plant isn’t as hardy as it’s supposed to be. The plant was launched previously across Europe, where rose hybridizers say the winters, even in Norway and Sweden, are milder than those in the northern United States. The Missoula Rose Society, a group of Montana rose enthusiasts, reports that none of the 25 plants in its tester garden made it through last year’s cold winter.
As for disease resistance, William Radler, the retired director of Milwaukee’s public Boerner Botanical Gardens, said Flower Carpet performs quite well, but still isn’t impervious.
