Category playbooks for DTC brands
A plant is the only thing you will ever wholesale that keeps changing after the price is agreed. A tray of six-inch calathea booked on Monday is a taller, heavier, slightly more fragile tray by the time the van leaves on Thursday, and if the order slips a fortnight it has become a different product with a different price.
Everything strange about selling live goods comes out of that. The unit of trade is a pot size, not a product name. The case pack is a tray. The ordering window is short and moves with the weather. And a real share of the job is paperwork that a candle maker never has to think about once.
Pot size is the unit of trade
Nobody in this trade asks what the plant is called first. They ask what it is in.
- Plugs and liners, sold by the cell tray — seventy-two or a hundred and five cells is typical — to other growers and to garden centres that want to finish them on their own bench.
- Four-inch, including the three-and-a-half-inch square, which is the impulse price point: herbs, annuals, small foliage, the thing that goes on a counter display.
- Six-inch, the gift price point, and where most independent plant shops actually live.
- One-gallon and up, priced by the container, which is shrub and perennial and landscape territory and a different buyer entirely.
Your price list is a grid of sizes with variety names hanging off it, and buyers read down the size column before they read anything else. Two growers quoting the same variety at the same number are not quoting the same thing if one of them is in a four-inch. Say the size in the first line of every quote, every time.
The tray is your case pack
You cannot sell one plant. The tray is the unit that survives a van, and it is how the order is counted, loaded, invoiced and credited.
Eight six-inch pots to a carry tray is common. Fifteen or eighteen four-inch. Seventy-two plugs to the cell tray. Trays then stack onto a rolling rack — a Danish trolley, a CC cart, whatever your region calls it — and the rack is what actually moves through a delivery door.
Two consequences for a grower who has only ever shipped single plants to consumers. First, set your minimum in trays or racks rather than in dollars: a buyer who orders three loose six-inch has cost you the same handling as one who orders a full tray, and the loose order is the one that arrives damaged. Second, mixed trays are a premium service. Some growers offer them, most charge for them, and none of them enjoy it. If you have never set a case unit before, case pack covers how the decision cascades into everything downstream.
What one rack of six-inch earns
Work it through on a single variety so the numbers stay honest.
A six-inch calathea starts as a liner costing a dollar eighty. Pot, soil and tag are ninety-five cents. Fourteen weeks of bench space, water, feed and the hand that turns and spaces it comes to two dollars thirty-five. That is five dollars ten a pot, except one in ten never makes grade, so nine saleable plants carry the cost of ten: call the real cost five dollars sixty-seven.
You sell it at nine dollars fifty, eight to a tray. The tray is seventy-six dollars against forty-five dollars thirty-six of cost, so thirty dollars sixty-four a tray. A rack holding twelve trays is ninety-six plants, nine hundred and twelve dollars of invoice and about three hundred and sixty-eight dollars of contribution. Running your own van for a nine-stop day costs two hundred and ten dollars, so a stop that takes only one rack has eaten most of the margin on that rack before you have counted the credit you will issue for the two plants that arrived bruised.
The buyer takes that six-inch to twenty-four dollars retail, which is more than the usual doubling. That is not greed. A garden centre loses plants on its own bench, waters them, and throws some away, so live goods are priced above the normal retail markup for the same reason your own cost carries a shrink line. Understanding that is most of what stops a new grower from arguing with a buyer about the shelf price.
The paperwork nobody warns you about
This is where live goods stop resembling any other wholesale category.
Selling plants across a state line almost always requires a nursery or nursery dealer licence in the state you grow in, and an annual inspection of the growing grounds by the state agriculture department. The inspection is not a formality: the certificate that comes out of it is what lets the receiving state accept your shipment, and buyers in the pickier states will ask for the number before they open an account.
On top of that, several states run their own inbound requirements. Some want a shipping permit and a compliance agreement on file before the first box. Some want every carton marked with the certificate, and some will refuse soil entirely and accept only bare-root or washed-root material. Check the destination state before you quote, not after the buyer has sent a purchase order, because the answer sometimes changes the product.
Then there is variety ownership. A patented plant cannot be propagated without a licence, and the royalty and the tag that goes in the pot are part of your cost of goods, not an afterthought. Growing a protected variety without permission is the one mistake in this trade that ends with a letter from a lawyer rather than a credit note.
Last, noxious and invasive species lists differ state by state. A plant that is ordinary where you grow it can be prohibited three states over. Keep a short internal list of where each variety may and may not go, and put it on the availability list so nobody has to remember.
Can you ship live plants in a box?
Yes, and it is harder than it looks, which is why so many growers stay on their own van for as long as they can.
The controllables are transit time and temperature. Ship Monday to Wednesday so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend. Use two-day service for anything tender and accept that overnight is sometimes the only honest option. A heat pack goes in for cold weather, taped away from foliage so it warms the air and not the leaf, and a cold pack and an insulated liner go in for a summer route through a hot hub.
The physical packing is its own craft. Sleeve the foliage, tape or cradle the pot so the root ball does not come loose and turn the box into a soil shaker, and brace each plant against the wall of the box rather than against its neighbour. Ship the box the way it will be handled, which is on its side, upside down, and dropped.
Write the live-goods policy before the first complaint: photographs within twenty-four hours of delivery, credit rather than replacement, no claims on weather delays outside your control, and no claims on shipments the buyer asked you to hold. Publish it with your freight terms, because what a box costs to send is part of the quote in this category rather than a detail at checkout. Wholesale shipping cost covers how to build that into the price instead of absorbing it.
An availability list, not a line sheet
Other categories send a line sheet once a season and update it when something changes. Growers send an availability list, usually weekly, and it is a living document.
A usable availability list has the variety, the size, the price, how many are ready now, how many are ready in two or four weeks, and a note on anything restricted. Dates matter more than photography here. A buyer planning a weekend promotion needs to know whether your rosemary is ready on the ninth or the twenty-third, and a grower who cannot answer that gets left off the order.
Keep two prices in mind as you build it. Booked orders, agreed months ahead, deserve the better number because they let you plan the bench. Spot orders off this week's list pay the standard one. That split is the whole structure of a grower's wholesale price list, and it is worth making explicit rather than negotiating each time.
When does a plant buyer actually order?
Earlier than you expect, and then in a rush.
The pre-book happens in the autumn and winter for the following spring. A garden centre commits to quantities months ahead in exchange for price and availability, and a grower uses those commitments to decide what to put on the bench. If you are not on the list during that window, you are not in the spring, no matter how good the plants turn out.
Then the season arrives and the second pattern takes over: weekly spot orders driven entirely by weather and by what sold out on Saturday. That phase rewards whoever answers fastest and delivers soonest. A grower who publishes an availability list every Monday morning gets orders on Monday afternoon from buyers who were going to order from someone else.
Around those, there are holiday programmes with their own long lead times, and the foliage trade, which is steadier all year and is why so many growers keep a house-plant line alongside the seasonal one. Selling into shops rather than only through the garden centre channel changes the rhythm considerably, and the same buyers often stock pots, planters and stands from the suppliers described in home decor wholesale.
The first ten doors
Ten kinds of account a small grower can approach, starting with the ones that will actually reply:
- Independent garden centres within one day's van run.
- Retail florists, who buy blooming and foliage plants weekly and reorder without being asked.
- Studio and event florists, who buy in bursts and pay well for the right thing on the right date.
- Plant shops and lifestyle boutiques, which want six-inch foliage and something unusual.
- Interior landscapers and plantscaping companies, which buy the same varieties repeatedly on contract.
- Landscape designers and installers, for one-gallon and larger material.
- Grocery and supermarket floral programmes, which are volume, low margin and strict on specification.
- Hardware and farm supply stores with a garden yard.
- Botanical garden, arboretum and nature-centre shops, which buy native and regional material with a story attached.
- Market stallholders and seasonal pop-ups who resell, which is the lowest-friction first account most growers ever get.
Start with whoever is nearest. Delivery cost dominates this category, and a route with six stops inside forty minutes is worth more than a prestige account two hundred miles away that orders one rack.
If you cannot see how many of those exist near you, paste a link to one of your plants into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of the retailers that stock that sort of thing. It is a quicker way to build the first route than driving around reading signage.
The thing to fix before next season
Most growers who try wholesale and give up did not have a pricing problem. They had a grading problem: trays that went out uneven, a tag that fell off, two plants in twelve that should never have left the bench.
A buyer forgives a delay and never forgives an inconsistent tray, because an inconsistent tray is something they have to sort on their own floor during their own busy Saturday. Grade hard, ship a tray you would be happy to unload yourself, and the reorder takes care of itself.