404 
THE NATIONAL NURRERYHAN 
How We Build a Mail Order Business 
By H. G. Hastings, Pres. H. G. Hastings Co., Atlanta, Ga. 
Read before the Meeting of the Southern Nurserymen s Association, Atlanta, Ga., 
August 29th and 30th, 1917 
W HILE there is a marked difference between the 
character of goods handled by the nurseryman 
and the seedsman, yet our system of handling 
orders may prove interesting and methods of advertising, 
correspondence, shipping and filing may give the nursery¬ 
man ideas of value for his own business. 
There are, however, a few fundamentals that ohseiTa- 
tion shows as applying to all mail order businesses, and 
the one above all others, is that no mail order business, bo 
it seeds or an yotlier sort of merchandise can start big, or 
be a real money-maker from the start. Every large mail 
order seed or plant house, every one of the successful 
general mail order houses, such as Montgomery-Ward k 
Co., or Sears-Roebuck, have grown from small begin¬ 
nings, grown gradually in size as they grew in confidence 
of the public through fair dealings and fair advertising. 
Unless a man has patience, grit and sufficient capital or 
backing to carry him for five to seven years without ma¬ 
terial profit, he had better not make the start, for he is not 
of the mail-order house pattern. This may not be fully 
true along general mail order lines where there is oppor¬ 
tunity for more frequent turn-over of stock, but it is ab¬ 
solutely true as to seed, plant and tree concerns where the 
turn-over or sales of stock produced is limited to once a 
year or a longer period. 
Our beginning was in a small town in Florida, and 
seven or eight hundred feet of floor space was ample for 
three or four years. Also a force consisting of myself 
and a twelve-year-old boy were ample force to take care 
of all orders for the first three years. 
Our recollection is that our first year’s sales amounted 
to some ,$2,800.00, which gave both the proprietor and his 
working force plenty of time to go fishing or any other 
form of amusement after the day’s orders were filled. 
This business was continued at the original location for 
some ten years, at the end of which time annual sales had 
reached nearly nineteen thousand dollars. During these 
slow years, however, came time for learning the business 
and analysis of conditions. With the years came a realiz¬ 
ation that our location was wrong. We were too far south 
for the establishment of a mail order business in our line, 
solely and simply for the reason that the practice and 
habit of a hundred years or more of seed-buying had been 
from locations north or east of the buyer. 
We were located some sixty miles south of Jackson¬ 
ville, Florida, just in the northern edge of the peninsular 
part of the state. Once our reputation was fairly estab¬ 
lished for reliability, we had little difficulty in getting a 
good share of the seed business to the south of us. but get¬ 
ting business from those parts of Florida to the north and 
west of us was like pulling teeth. Georgia and Alabama 
would not look at us. Further, we were located on a 
branch line railroad and it often took almost as long for a 
customer living a hundred miles away to get seeds from 
us as it would if he sent his order to Baltimore or Phila¬ 
delphia. This slowness was due to had railroad connec¬ 
tions, slow trains, etc. 
We were ambitious to have a real sizable business, and 
we knew it to he impossible with the limitations imposed 
by our original location. This, together with the wiping 
out of our other interests in the way of orange groves and 
citrus nurseries by the freezes of 1895 and 1899 deter¬ 
mined us to move, which we did in the fall of 1899, com¬ 
ing to Atlanta. 
In those days the South as a whole had no mail seed 
house of any consequence. We saw no reason why the 
South should not have a mail order seed house, just as the 
North had its Henderson’s, Burpee’s, Vaughan’s, etc. The 
field was absolutely open to us, and we had a vision of a 
coming development in the South which is now in process 
of realization. 
Atlanta was chosen after a careful study of conditions 
by us. First, it was probably the best and most favorably 
known city in the South, and second, it’s railroad facili¬ 
ties were the best for quick distribution of goods by mail, 
express or freight; third, there is a certain amount of 
prestige which comes from doing business in or being lo¬ 
cated in or near one of the larger cities. 
From a mail order standpoint this it not an invariable 
rule, this matter of city location. The exceptions, howevei’, 
are rare. We know of only notable exception in seeds, 
two or three in nursery and plant lines. 
We came to Atlanta eighteen years ago. We opened up 
with four employees brought from Florida and a negro 
porter. We had some vague imaginings that as soon as it 
became noised around a little that we had opened up in 
Atlanta that the orders would come rolling in from 
Georgia and Alabama in sufficient volume to swamp us. 
Those first two or three years disillusioned us. In the 
first place the Cotton Belt was just beginning to recover 
from a long period of business depression. A nickel then 
looked bigger to a farmer than a dollar does now and he 
hung on to every stray nickel that came his way. 
While our Florida business largely stuck to us, before 
we could got Cotton Belt business we had to convince an 
entirely new set of people of the reliability of our house, 
the quality of our seeds, etc. We were further handi¬ 
capped by the fact that there never had been a mail order 
seed house in the South and folks in the South just nat¬ 
urally shied off from the idea that there could be such a 
thing. 
I don’t like to recall the details of those first seven 
years’ struggle in Atlanta. It’s not a comfortable thing to 
go over even viewed from a point of a fairly successful 
career. It was seven years of hard, day and night plug¬ 
ging, advei-tising and pushing the merit of our goods in 
every way we possibly could. 
Despite the temptation to do otherwise, however, we ab¬ 
solutely stuck to the high standard we set of never send- 
