Company: Etera, an online plant seller in Mount Vernon, Wash.
Annual sales: $30 million projected
The high-profile demise of Garden.com just 14 months after its IPO suggests that selling live plants online is not a fertile idea. But Etera is finding a way to make it work.
CEO Carl Loeb built a diversified business that combines the selling of his plants online and offline with technology offerings for nurseries and wholesale plant suppliers. And like many Internet entrepreneurs, Loeb counts among his prime assets a patent - though not one about one-click shopping or name-your-price gimmicks. His is a method - with coconut fibers, drip-irrigation tape and bottomless planting pots - for growing small perennials that, once transplanted, get big fast. Their small size makes the plants ideal for shipping through FedEx.
But instead of just peddling his own plants online in the manner of Garden.com, Loeb lets independent nurseries that are closer to customers do most of the selling. To help them, Etera set up a tech business that, for $20 a month, provides nurseries with personalized Web stores containing mounds of gardening information. Nurseries get a 10 percent cut of all online sales, which Etera fulfills. They also gain access to plants from hundreds of wholesale suppliers that Etera has connected to the Web sites, and they carry Etera's plants in their stores for offline sales.
With more than 1,600 garden centers on its national network, little-known Etera is on track to rack up more than $30 million in sales in the next fiscal year, according to Loeb. Over the past 12 months, Etera has doubled its permanent workforce to 150. He expects to break even next year.
Loeb's ambition is to turn Etera into a brand - the first in the $37 billion horticultural industry. "Plants are not predictable," he says. But his patented process gives plants a predetermined growing pattern that makes branding possible, he adds. It's hard not to see a bit of the Net dreamer in Loeb. Yet for now, his formula is sprouting as nicely as his perennials.
