Just because Gen Z are digital natives doesn’t mean they’re immune to the analog pleasure of planting bulbs in the backyard. In 2024, 61.5% of Gen Z consumers reported spending more money on gardening than the previous year, more than millennials (48%), Gen X, (48.3%) and boomers (25.8%), according to an Axiom gardening survey.
Axiom also found that zoomers were the most likely to say they’d increase their time gardening in 2025, with 69.2% planning to do so, significantly more than millennials (51%), Gen X, (43%) and boomers (27.3%).
Now a new marketing platform, Plantista, promises to help garden centers take root with this new generation of gardeners. Plantista’s features include an AI design tool that not only recommends plants that would thrive in users’ unique sunlight and soil conditions but also provides landscape-design options that, after users upload yard photos, shows options how those flowers, shrubs, trees, and vegetables could be arrayed.
Users can set many parameters, including requesting plants and designs that require little water (xeriscapes) or attract pollinators like butterflies and bees.
Plus—and perhaps more importantly for those who’ve inadvertently killed plants—the platform enables garden center customers to opt in for care-reminder texts. The texts tell them when they need to water their wisteria, fertilize their fig trees, and prune their peonies.
While the tools are simple enough to be used by gardeners of any vintage, Ashley Wright, CEO and co-founder of Plantista, said they will hold particular appeal for younger consumers. Most “don’t want to talk to anyone, so this is a way for them to kind of DIY that experience,” Wright told Retail Brew. “They really just want to do it themselves and have the tools for that.”
What’s in it for garden centers: frequent opportunities to monetize all those plant tips texts by recommending specific products they carry to complete the tasks.
A text “would tell you, ‘Hey, it’s time to fertilize your plant,’” Wright explained. “‘Here’s what we recommend. Here’s a coupon.’”
Other features of the Plantista platform include an AI chatbot, “Alice,” that answers gardening questions.
Branching out: Wright, whose mother worked in nurseries and as a landscape designer when she was growing up, notes that independent garden centers have not been the fastest when it comes to embracing technology.
“These businesses are highly generational, family-owned businesses,” Wright said. “Because this industry has been siloed, traditional tech, traditional VC hasn’t looked at it before.”
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Mark Bigej, COO and co-owner (with his two sisters) of Al’s Garden & Home, a chain of four garden centers in Oregon that grew out of a humble fruit stand his grandfather Al opened in 1948, agreed.
The garden center industry is “behind the times as far as retail goes,” Bigej told Retail Brew. “We’re kind of technology infants…Because we don’t adopt it as quickly, people aren’t as willing to make it for us.”
But Bigej is an early adopter of Plantista, one of about 10 garden centers (and one landscaping firm) now using the platform, and he also serves on the startup’s customer advisory board.
Both the AI plant design feature and the care reminders may help prospective customers overcome the fear of failure, which with plants can be particularly upsetting because it means they’ve killed something.
“These reminders give them the confidence that, ‘Hey, I can succeed,’” Bigej said. “‘It’s going to remind me when to water, it’s going to remind me when to fertilize.’”
Although Bigej grew up in the business, he has felt out of his element in other retail settings.
“Walking into an auto store, I don’t know the difference from a spark plug or a brake pad,” Bigej said. “I feel intimidated, so I can imagine what they feel coming into our garden centers.”
Chard remains: Wright noted that many independent garden centers now have plant return policies similar to The Home Depot and Lowe’s, which allow returns for up to 365 days for some outdoor plants, shrubs, and trees.
For garden centers, she said that return rate averages about 10%, meaning no matter how much customers are to blame for a rose bush dying (or just failing to thrive), it’s the retailers who eat it.
But Plantista could help mitigate that.
“When their customers are signed up for care reminders, they actually see a near-zero return-purchase rate,” Wright said.
Bigej has been using the platform for only a few months, so has no firm data yet on his return on investment, but he’s bullish, especially as a third-generation retailer expecting to usher his children into the business.
“It’s easy to fall into that trap of falling behind the times,” he said of independent garden centers like his being slow to embrace technology. “Seeing something new come to our industry was very exciting.”