Garden.com: Growing By Its Own Rules

They started holding gardening focus groups and found that the serious gardeners usually shopped from 30 different catalogs, each with a different niche—bulbs, seeds, plants, tools, etc.

The industry’s segmentation has much to do with shipping and growing issues. Catalogers realized that buyers shop for one particular type of plant at a time rather than buying a variety in one shot. Typically, several growers source a gardening catalog, but can hardly keep pace to offer the kind of variety buyers desire.