All about Flowers : James Vick's Nineteenth-Century Seed Company

Authors

Thomas J. Mickey

Files

Description

A nineteenth-century entrepreneur’s bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of America’s favorite hobbies.

“There is much that is hard and productive of sorrow in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be borne.” So states a customer’s 1881 letter—one of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vick’s business, selling flower seeds through the mail, wasn’t unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers’ emotions. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds.

Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He spent a mind-boggling $100,000 per year on advertising (mostly to women, his target demographic); he courted newspaper editors for free publicity; his educational guides presaged today’s content marketing; he recruited social influencers to popularize neighborhood gardening clubs; and he developed a visually rich communication and branding strategy to build customer loyalty and inflect their purchasing needs with purchasing desire.

Copyright Statement

All about Flowers © 2021 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780804041140

Publication Date

5-7-2021

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Gardening, James Vick, business history, flowers, biography, nineteenth century, marketing, Victorian gardens, ornamental horticulture

Disciplines

Graphic Communications | Leisure Studies | Marketing | Sales and Merchandising | Social Psychology and Interaction | United States History

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Mickey, Thomas J., "All about Flowers : James Vick's Nineteenth-Century Seed Company" (2021). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 82.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/82