People Are Investing in Their Gardens during the Lockdown
“My brother Roni and I opened the garden center at the entrance to the Givat Ram Botanical Garden in Jerusalem in 2007. It’s a vast garden center, offering the widest range of products possible— irrigation systems, outdoor and indoor plants, rockeries and soil. We work with approximately 200 gardeners, large institutions including the Jerusalem Municipality, the Knesset and the Bank of Israel, and private customers. On the eve of the COVID19 outbreak, we had approximately 30 employees, but when the first lockdown came around I furloughed all of them bar two, because we had no idea what the future held.
“As things started moving, it became clear that the extended period of time at home meant that people’s need for greenery and their desire to tend their gardens was increasing, not to mention that they had a lot more free time. So we started bringing people back to work in deliveries. It was not easy— you can’t simply create a catalogue of plants and display it on your website. Plants are usually seasonal, and there is always a turnover of products. We worked alongside the sales team, communicating with clients over video calls, and we built ourselves up, one delivery after another. We had four taxis and two private vehicles going to the customers’ doors.
“In the break between the first and second lockdowns, we noticed a sharp increase in sales, partially because a lot of people had started to grow their own herbs and vegetables. That led to a drop in sales from gardeners, because a lot of people started to look after their gardens themselves. During that period, we sold more irrigation systems to private clients than at any time before. During the second lockdown, we had fewer orders. Customers were saying, ‘ we’ll come back as soon as you reopen, because we want to see the plants ourselves’. We carried on with our large- scale gardening projects, including one with a large hotel chain by the Dead Sea, and we continue to try to reinvent ourselves in new and exciting ways.”
The writer is the owner of Cocktail Plants Inc.
Yehuda Burla 1, entrance to the Botanical Garden, Jerusalem. Tel: 052- 2535964