AeroGrow Finds Market for Countertop Garden
By Greg Avery, Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.
Feb. 5–AeroGrow International hopes to do for indoor, countertop gardening what the George Foreman Grill did for countertop grilling — invent a market and make millions of customers want something they never considered possible.
And the local company has gotten off to a solid start.
After years in development and raising money from more than 700 investors, two-thirds of them small investors from Colorado, the AeroGarden has arrived.
The 12-pound gardening gadgets are selling as fast as the Gunbarrel company can produce them. Amazon.com and AeroGrow’s Web sites list the kits for $149.
Mentions of AeroGardens, generally positive, litter dozens of Web sites.
The AeroGarden now has a late-night infomercial. It appears in a growing list of catalogues, including SkyMall, Hammacher Schlemmer and Discovery. Shoppers can find it on the shelves of stores including Sur La Table, Peppercorn and McGuckin Hardware.
“We expected this to be a new product category,” said Michael Bissonnette, chief executive officer. “We didn’t realize it, but we’ve created a new industry.”
More than 100,000 AeroGardens are in use already, the company said.
What’s more, the company estimates 26 million people in the country — gourmands, health-food devotees and gardeners — are already growing their own herbs and vegetables, making a ready market.
Other companies sell growing machines. But, similar to how Apple’s iPod transformed MP3 players, the AeroGarden’s appeal and simplicity has changed people’s expectation for what indoor gardening can be, Bissonnette said.
Growing herbs or vegetables in one’s kitchen has become as simple as toasting bread; it just takes longer, he said.
AeroGrow developed everything for its grow machines from scratch. It contracts construction of the AeroGarden’s plastic body and compact fluorescent lights to a pair of Chinese manufacturers.
AeroGrow mixes its own batches of sea salts and minerals into organic fertilizer tablets that feed the seeds and plants and balance the acidity of any tap water customers use.
Green plants brim out of shelf after shelf of AeroGardens in a grow lab on the ground floor of the company’s headquarters. It tests dozens of plant varieties to see how well they grow in the compact space necessitated by the AeroGarden. Only varieties that are virtually guaranteed to thrive are offered for sale, said John Thompson, AeroGrow marketing manager.
The company launched in 2004 and raised money in a rare in-state shares offering that attracted investors. The company began issuing public stock on over-the-counter bulletin boards under the ticker symbol AGWI.
To perfect the AeroGarden, it sent out dozens of prototypes to would-be customers for months discovering various ways gardeners are likely to mess up and kill plants. Then the company designed a way for the machine to keep that from happening.
Growing is entirely automated — self-watering, automatic lights — except for replenishing the machine’s nutrient solution. A light comes on to let you know when it’s time.
The worry-free, dirtless way of growing won AeroGardens mentions as good gifts on The View, Oprah and the 12 days of giveaways on Ellen DeGeneres’ television show.
The exposure gave the AeroGardens cachet for when they hit the retail market in the fall, Thompson said.
“We built enough for what we thought was three Christmases, and we sold every one of them,” he said.
A squad of 75 workers, mostly temporary, puts together the seed clusters in special foam pods at a factory space just east of Longmont. A machine in a dusty room off the main production floor stamps out dozens of fertilizer tablets per hour.
The workers assembled 100,000 orders in January, and the process is getting refined and faster all the time, said Bob Jasper, a manufacturing process manager.
Bissonnette projects the company’s revenue to exceed $4.8 million in its next fiscal quarter, six times what it made in its first fiscal quarter this year.
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