Thirty years ago, after Andy Barbott had taken a college class at Andrews University, he decided that he wanted to build a greenhouse on the family’s farm south of Lakeshore High School. He says he had a real interest after taking the class with a professor that he really liked, and he built his first greenhouse in the spring of 1989. Little did he know that one small decision like that would explode over the next three decades into a major family business as a leading provider of plants, hanging baskets and potted arrangements like nobody else in the region. Well, that and a little song about Barbotts, Targuts, Starguts…etc.
It just so happens that right about that point in time, as Andy tells it, “Whirlpool was going through one of their famous reorganizations, and they put my mom in a position that she wasn’t happy with so she decided if we were building a greenhouse, then she was going to sell some flowers.” So, out of the front part of the greenhouse, she sold flowers and in the back half the family grew farm peppers, tomatoes, and the flowering plants.
Well, Andy says, “The flowers went so well that the next year she kicked us out of the greenhouse and we had to build a new one, for the pepper plants and she then used the whole greenhouse for flowers, and it just grew from there.”
That first greenhouse at Barbott Farms & Greenhouse was probably around 1,500 square feet, and looks minuscule now as Barbott says, “Right now we are probably close to 20,000 square feet under roof. That is just our retail store. If you include everything, including our growing area, we are probably somewhere around 100,000 square feet under roof.” That is a substantial pattern of growth.
Andy feels that it comes down to the multi-generation family’s focus on quality and customer service. He says, “We really pride ourselves on the quality that we grow, and we grow everything here on the farm now, when we started, obviously we were buying stuff and bringing it in, but we’re at the point now where with the exception of some very unique specialty plants, we are growing everything that we sell here, on the farm.”
When it comes to customer service, Andy says, “We do whatever we need to do to make the customer happy, giving them the best quality product at the same time. People bring their planters to us, we plant them for them every year, and they’ll bring empty pots back from last year, which we replant…so service and quality are the two hallmarks of the business.”
At the peak of the season, like right now, the greenhouse is absolutely booming. The selection is seemingly endless. They have over 100 varieties of hanging baskets now. When they started 30 years ago, there were 6 varieties. Andy says, “Perennials, our first year, we had about 10 varieties, this year we have over 200. Probably the biggest thing, the biggest trend that we’re seeing now, is people want planters done, and they want pots done for them. We’re selling fewer flats every year, but we’re selling more and more planters and doing more custom work for people every year.”
Barbott says, “They will bring in the empty pots, and we have an entire, separate, greenhouse on site all filled with things that people have brought in, which we have planted for them, and they come back and pick them up and put them on their patios.”
It’s still very much a family affair at Barbott Farm & Greenhouse which is located at 7155 Cleveland Avenue in Stevensville, a mile and a half south of Lakeshore High School.
Andy says, “Mom still helps out occasionally, but it’s my wife, Miriam and I, and Matthew, who is graduating this year from Michigan State University, and then he will be here on the farm full-time. Jeremy my youngest just graduated from John Deere Tech School, he works at John Deere all day and comes home and helps us out at night and on the weekends. We’re all here pretty much all of the time.” His Mom is Sandy Jewell, who remarried later, after Andy’s dad passed away at the age of only 44.
The selection can boggle your mind at the sprawling greenhouse. Babott says, “If you included everything in the greenhouse there would be thousands of varieties of plants here. Our lines of Proven Winners and specialty annuals, nearly 150 different varieties of those, are what people are really turning to. They’re getting away from the flats and getting more into specialty, larger, potted arrangements. We’ve got 25 different colors of geraniums in pots and our philosophy here is if we have a customer or two who ask for something we don’t have…next year we have it. There’s a list being kept up at the register, if somebody says something, it gets written down and if two people ask for it, we have it next year. There’s a wish-list up in front there, also, that the girls are always writing notes down. If we don’t have it, we’ll find it and carry it next time because we feel that the customer came here thinking we should have it, so our customer service says ‘if you think we should have it, then we have it.’”
Anybody who has ever listened to local radio in the past couple of decades has undoubtedly heard the famous Barbott Farms & Greenhouse homemade jingle that makes fun of the business name. Andy says, “The jingle came about — the whole ad campaign came about — because we had customers coming in, purchasing stuff and when they went to check out they didn’t know where they were at. They wanted to write checks to all sorts of competing florists, nurseries and other roadside stands.” He says, “They didn’t know where they were at, and that kind of bothered me, so we went to the radio station and went through creative meetings and one week they came back with this crazy idea that ‘We’re gonna make fun of your name and people are going to remember it when you’re done.'”
The ad campaign started out without the music, but it evolved into the jingle and, he says, “You would be amazed! Mid to late summer I can be up at Ace Hardware or Meijer, standing in line, and if I have my company shirt on, someone will see the name and start singing the jingle…somebody I don’t even know, so it makes you feel like you’ve made a wise investment.”
He’ll be the first to tell you that the corny, homemade jingle sung by radio producer Paul Layendecker, is, well…”It’s something people do, truly, remember. Even if it hasn’t played since May and I see someone in September, it happens all the time. We’ve talked about updating and things like that, but I’m a firm believer in what works and just do it. Our seasonal window is such a short period of time — our peak, for all practical purposes is 8 weeks out of the year — so when we start playing that jingle the first week in May, people hear that and come in and say I’ve been hearing your jingle for months. It only played for three days, yet they think its been playing forever because of that repetition. For me, when anybody asks me, I’m a true believer in radio. You guys have taken us from a small operation that was very small into a very successful big business.”
And, it’s not over yet, by a long shot. Andy says they just finished putting on an addition. He tells me, “We went from 12,000 square feet of retail to 20,000 square feet of retail.” He adds, “We’re kind of at the start of a five year plan. That plan really is based around customer satisfaction and customer service. In order to provide the best we needed more space. One of the things that we’re hearing from our customers is that we didn’t have enough shopping carts, and we couldn’t have shopping carts until we had bigger walkways, so probably a third to a half of our new addition has really been just making bigger new aisles and walkway spaces so that customers can get in here and be more comfortable, and we can add more shopping carts, so when we put the new addition on, we also doubled our number of shopping carts and people are just really happy this year, and it has really worked out well.”
When the greenhouse is busy now it doesn’t feel cramped. Barbott says before people were crawling all over each other and now people can easily get through the store, and its more spread out, and it has really worked out well.
You will find Team Barbott in the house Monday through Saturday from 9am to 6pm, and Sundays from 10 to 5. Andy says, “We are here in the greenhouse all the way from now until the 4th of July weekend, then we move everything from here to the roadside so that we can be outside, because it gets really warm inside. It all goes back to customer comfort. You want customers to be happy and comfortable, so we move out there and we also launch our summer sale at that time.”
All in all Barbott Farms & Greenhouse comprises about 300 acres of farm land, on top of the green house operation. Andy says, “We were a farm, that’s what we were known for, Barbott Farms, but probably since the early 2000s, we have kind of switched to where the focus is actually the greenhouse and while the farm is still our roots, and we still enjoy all of that, but truly, our focus is here and our income comes in from these buildings.”
The family got out of the produce business, with the exception of pumpkins and fall squash for their CornMaze and roadside, to go along with the mums they grow, and the rest of it all is grain crops. Most of the crop goes to the ethanol plant in South Bend, “because they pay the best.” Their field crops are now strictly corn and soybeans – about half and half. Andy says his son Matthew is graduating and is starting his own portion of farm to supplement being an employee, but also having his own farm, “So we all work together as a family and help each other out.”
Barbott says, “If you haven’t been here in several years, you probably haven’t been here. We have really expanded the last few years on a lot of things — bigger displays, more product, different product. We’re bringing in tropicals from Florida which are almost all gone now after Mother’s Day which was a huge success. We have really worked hard the last few years to bring in as much stuff as we can, grow as much as we can, for the customers, that they’re asking for.”
The Barbott family takes great pride also in going to bat for the community. As Andy tells it, “One of the biggest things we do probably in the last four or five years has been our fundraisers for schools, we are supporting probably 25 different churches, schools, bands, and basically selling them flats for wholesale prices to allow them to mark them up to retail and make some great money for their programs. That has really grown from selling a couple of hundred to now selling several thousand of these gift certificates to schools who are making good profits on the program.” That plan stemmed from the continuous parade of people coming in for donations, and they just decided, “We would rather the kids have some skin in the game, so I think in the long run we are supporting our communities, in a lot of ways, and in return the community has really supported us. We’re getting those people coming in to redeem their certificates and pick up their baskets, and they’re like, ‘Wow…we’ve never seen this before,’ and they’re buying while they’re here. We do that with flats, baskets, potted products and it has been a huge success, and worked well both ways. The Lakeshore Band has made it a huge part of their fundraising, and we’re very happy with that.”
The community still beats a path to the greenhouse routinely. Andy says, “My dad used to give the little kids that would come in with their parents a little pot and a plant to put in it and take it home. We’re now seeing some of those little kids coming back as customers themselves bringing in their own kids, and we’ve watched them grow.” He adds, “With us actually being in the greenhouse all the time, we have that great connection with our customers. They’re here every year, they come in and see us, we see them, and talk with them, and I really like that part of the business.”
Barbott has two full time employees year round, but in-season that balloons to another 14 or 15 extra to help handle the seasonal load, before ramping down in July but then bringing them right back on for corn maze season.
So what’s this year’s corn maze theme? Andy says, “If the rain will ever quit, we’re doing Star Wars this year as the corn maze theme. With the new movie and kids really enjoying it, that’s the one thing we haven’t done yet. If we could ever get in the fields, that’s what it will be.”
The weather hasn’t really hurt things. Andy says, “From our standpoint it has been an okay spring, a little bit of a struggle because there’s been less sunshine, making things grow slower in the greenhouse, and colder, so we’ve been subsidizing with a lot more heat, but the quality is really good for what we’ve gone through and from the customer stand point, we are actually ahead of sales this year, actually up by 15-percent at this point in the year, and I think its because maybe they’re buying more baskets right now because its wet and they haven’t been able to plant, either.”
Andy concludes, “I think we’re in good shape on flats, but I think the baskets and planters are running way ahead of schedule just because that’s what people are able to buy right now. People were definitely ready for spring. When the door opened up they just poured in hoping to see something other than snow.”
It’s a formula that has worked well for three decades now, and the Barbott family looks destined to be a part of many of our lives for decades more to come. Happy 30th Anniversary to the whole Barbott team.
In the photo accompanying this story on Moody on the Market.com are Matthew, Miriam and Andy Barbott from left to right.
