Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Reaping the rewards
Kennett media company exec receives lawn and garden industry award
Katie Dubow is the first recipient of a new award given out by GWA: The Association for Garden Communicators.
Creative director of Garden Media Group, the 34-year-old Dubow recently received this national trade organization’s first annual Emergent Communicator Honor at the organization’s annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Emergent Communicator Honor recognizes a professional under the age of 40 who shows exceptional skills, professional ethics and dedication to the association’s mission and values.
“My mother, Susan McCoy, started Garden Media Group (formerly Impact Marketing) 30 years ago and has never been recognized by this group before,” Dubow said. “She should have gotten this award for all her work with the gardening industry. But it means even more to her that I got it.”
Added McCoy, “Katie has a natural talent for being able to communicate. She can quickly grasp a situation and explain it logically. She can always find newsworthiness and what I call ‘the golden nugget.’ She knows what will resonate with our clients and she’s great at building relationships.”
Dubow explained that technology “allows us to have national and international clients. Our particular box is gardening: from seeds to garden furniture, what you plant, how you grow it, where you sit to enjoy what you planted.”
Garden Media currently has
10 clients; Dubow manages four of them.
They are: Davey Tree Expert Co., based in Kent, Ohio and with 80 U.S. locations; Sunlight Supply, the largest American supplier of indoor gardening products and headquartered in Vancouver, Washington; OPCOM Farm, a Taiwanese company whose U.S. offices are in Los Angeles, California (its main product is Grow Box, an indoor lighted gardening system); and Home Depot, for whom Garden Media supplies content for its consumer publications as well as for social and traditional media.
Garden Media has also worked with Longwood Gardens and Terrain, the garden, home and outdoor lifestyle store started by Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters eight years ago.
“All of our clients are different, with different goals,” Dubow said. “Some want regional PR; some want the ‘Today Show.’”
Before joining Garden Media in 2011, Dubow was a marketing manager for Liz Claiborne, Inc. and a technical production manager at CBS in New York. She graduated from Tower Hill School and Northeastern University. Residing in West Goshen with husband Ethan and their 2-year-old daughter Quinn, Dubow said that Quinn likes nothing better than to pull on petite gardening gloves and help her mother in the garden.
“We have a veggie garden, we have chickens, we have quite a collection of dahlias planted close to the house so I don’t have to dig them up every fall,” Dubow said. “And my house is filled with succulent plants. They’re a real décor trend – cool and easy and beautiful.”
To contact correspondent Sarah E. Moran, send an email to Semoran219@ gmail.com.
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