Garden.com: Growing By Its Own Rules

“But because we are really creating a national resource of one-stop shopping when we promote something, it is in stock,” she says, emphasizing that nothing ruins the customer experience more than out-of-stock products. “It forces us to think about what we will promote much further in advance. For the catalog we have to have a lot of one thing. With the online store, you can have more moderate amounts and keep switching them out. You are dealing with live goods that need to grow one year in advance, so [with the catalog] we have to say ‘grow 25,000 of this one.’”