406 
THE NATIONAL NURSERY^^IAN 
and solicits a particular trucking section for orders for a 
single item for three or four weeks each year, hut other 
than that all sales are made directly on catalogue repre¬ 
sentations. 
The other phase is the attempt to do both wholesale and 
a retail husiness in the same territory. It is utterly un¬ 
fair to stock a dealer in a territory on a wholesale basis 
and then attempt to do a retail husiness with that dealer’s 
prospective' customers. If the retail buyer purchases di¬ 
rect from the house it is a case of cutting the local deal¬ 
er’s throat. If the buyer purchases from the local dealer 
the house has cut its mail order throat, so to speak. 
It is no secret that a very large part of the sales of nur¬ 
sery stock are through traveling tree agents who purchase 
wholesale from the nurserymen. There are doubtediy 
many honest, conscientious traveling tree agents. It is 
equally true that there are a sufficient number of another 
stripe. It is no common thing to hear tree agents classed 
with lightning rod agents of unsavory fame, and the nur¬ 
seryman who employs or sells to these undesirables is cer¬ 
tainly morally responsible for the misrepresentations 
made by them. 
Misrepresentations by agents not only kill confidence in 
that particular agent, but give the entire nursery busi¬ 
ness a black eye and hold its proper development back. 
This may or may not be the reason for the comparative 
scarcity of fruit trees and shrubbery around the general¬ 
ity of southern fann houses, but I believe it to be a con¬ 
tributing factor and one that the nurseryman who takes a 
pride in his business should consider. 
Handling the nursery business on a high grade mail 
order basis seems to me perfectly feasible. Attractive 
catalogues would certainly encourage a greatly enlarged 
planting of fruit trees and shrubbery, prices could be 
made lower than those charged by traveling agents and if 
stock and service was right the nurseryman would each 
year be building up a reputation that w ould in reality be 
a trademark and wdiich no one could take aw^ay from him. 
I fully believe almost any line of retail business is cap¬ 
able of being successfully handled on a mail order basis. 
Success, how^ever, will be dependent absolutely on the 
quality of service rendered. 
In the earlier part of this paper reference w^as 
made to the humble beginnings of our firm that some 
of our good friends, in similar lines north, are kind 
enough to say is now either the second or third largest 
mail order seed house in the United States. You may 
be interested in making comparisons. 
Twenty-eight years ago, the season of 1889-90, two 
were ample to handle all the business in a few hundred 
feet of floor space. We now occupy a little over 
67,000 square feet of floor space in Atlanta, employ a 
regular all-the-year round force of some seventy-five 
people. This regular force expanded to about 226 dur¬ 
ing the height of the active seed selling season of last 
spring. 
During the fiscal year ending June 1st, 1917, ap¬ 
proximately four hundred thousand orders were filled. 
During the spring season of 1916 a record w^as made of 
filling six thousand orders in one day, a record for order 
filling in American seed houses. 
The seed business has its peculiar kinds of troubles, 
not the least of wffiich is that about one-half of the 
year’s business is done in some eight wrecks in the 
year. To meet this sort of condition the business has 
to be systematized to the fulle.st degree. x4s much 
advance work such as packeting the seeds, getting in 
all supplies ahead, etc., must he done before the orders 
begin to come in. 
In catalogue jireparation our catalogue is not through 
the printer’s hands before work on the next one begins. 
As an example artists had begun work on the cover of 
our 1918 annual twx) weeks or more before the printing 
and mailing of the 1917 summer and fall catalogue was 
completed. 
Incidental to these we w ish to express our firm belief 
in the value of a carefully designed and printed cover 
in colors. First impressions count a great deal. The 
catalogue cover is the introduction of your house to 
the prospective buyer and it makes a decided difference 
whether he gets the right kind of an impression as he 
takes the catalogue from envelope or wrapper. 
Colored covers can usually be made to pay their 
cost by using them to carry attractive offers in natural 
colors, usually some specialties or apparent bargains. 
Buy good printing and as a rule, place catalogue 
work as covering seeds, plants and trees in the hands 
of a printer who makes a specialty of that class of work. 
Some of the wmrst botches we have ever seen in seed, 
plant and nursery catalogues have come from good 
printing plants unaccustomed to this class of work. 
Do not, as a rule, place contracts with printers who 
offer you the lowest price. There is a reason for low 
prices for printing and its the same reason that applies 
to low prices for other things. You get out of it poor 
service and inferior printing. 
For the past five or six years we have not asked for 
bids on catalogue or cover printing. We turn the 
specifications to the printer and our bill is based on the 
actual cost of paper, labor and other material, plus an 
agreed percentage of profit for the printer. In this 
way there is no skimping in (juality of work and ma¬ 
terials used and full count is insured. 
This is a rambling sort of a paper, hurriedly gotten 
up on the verge of departure and with a score of other 
matters pressing for attention. It’s not what I would 
like to have given you or wdiat the occasion deserves. 
I will close it, however, by saying that I am an absolute 
believer in “mail order” as applied to seeds, plants and 
trees. 
It’s a clean cut business and one has the money in 
hand before the goods leave the hands of the seller. 
No man should go into it, however, without counting 
the cost of money and time necessary in advance, other- 
wdse he will be apt to grow faint-hearted before he gets 
over to the jirofit side of the hill. 
x\ catalogue or mail order house does nothing more 
or less than put the art of salesmanship on paper and 
through the mails there is almost no limit to the num¬ 
ber of prospective buyers bis paper salesman can see 
and talk to in a season. 
