Half-Built on Success
By Pete Mihalek, Managing Editor, Lawn & Garden Retailer
While finished displays are great, the staff at Hill Country Water Gardens uses a half-built approach to encourage and educate their DIY customers.
Hill Country Water Gardens keeps a lot of pottery in stock — approximately four containers worth — and for good reason. This business turns 40 to 50 percent of it into disappearing fountains, “which is a top-selling item for us and something we’ve sold since day one,” says owner Steve Kainer.
Disappearing fountains look great in a landscape or worked into a pottery display, but if a customer is new to the concept, they might not understand how it works and what is takes to get them running.
Kainer and his staff introduce this water feature through their half-built disappearing fountain displays.
“Basically, this means we’ve taken a feature that would be installed in a customer’s home and instead of showing how the finished project would look, we do not completely install it into the ground,” Kainer explains. “We only cover half of it with gravel, leaving parts exposed that normally wouldn’t be.” This way customers can see the grates, the mesh and the kit that makes the fountain run.
Building Their Confidence
After seeing something day in and day out, year after year, sometimes we can get into the habit of thinking something’s stale or obvious. But Kainer says it can be a very neat thing to witness a customer see a disappearing fountain for the very first time and not quite understand how they work.
“Our Learning Center will play host to four to six instructional seminars in the spring and summer on disappearing fountains, which typically draw 30 to 40 people,” he says. “At any given time, though, this area is also a great sales tool, too.”
Set toward the back of Hill Country’s layout, ponds, water gardens, half-built disappearing streams and rainwater collection systems are also on display for better understanding.
He adds, in this area, customers will walk up to a half-built display and get an easy “aha!” moment and go, “Oh, I get it now.”
Staff of Experts
During the peak season, Hill Country will have 25 to 30 staff on hand. Part of their training is the disappearing fountain’s road to a sale.
“Our staff is great at interacting with customers who are still unsure of how a disappearing fountain works,” Kainer says. “They’ll walk the customer back to our learning center to see the concept ‘in the works.’ There, they’ll receive a pamphlet and checklist detailing the project.”
This is a multi-faceted project that includes a reservoir, pump, gravel and the feature, which can be pottery, travertine stones and boulders.
Making Sense
Once customers leave the Learning Center, they are now able to walk the yard with a better sense of how this water feature can work for them.
Kainer says, “They’ll say, ‘Okay, now I know how they did that. It’s easy enough for us to do it, too.’”
They also know the cost of the disappearing fountain kit. There’s no gray area. All shoppers have to do is add the feature (pottery, travertine stones and boulders) and they’ll know exactly what they’re spending.
