Garden.com and other online retailers are changing direct marketing—including the look and function of the mail order catalog

By Melissa Sepos

Making it Come Together

The business model for offering 20,000 garden products and delivering them to the garden gate means Garden.com can’t afford to operate as a cataloger. So what looks like a catalog really just perpetuates Garden.com’s online business model.

Garden.com caters to the busy baby boomer. Its entire business model works on the convenience of the Internet. Category-killer gardening sales is too complex to be done off-line. It requires a fast, efficient operating system to facilitate communication, make split-second changes to the merchandise display and ship perishables.