I have an idea for a business I am thinking of pursuing - developing a library of pre-drawn landscape designs for homeowners to install in their own yards, based on common yard sizes. These designs would be drawn to scale by a professional landscape designer (me). They would be suitable for homeowners to install themselves, or hire a landscape installer to do it for them. The designs themselves would be 11X17 good quality photocopies (so I can sell billions of them ).
Selling these designs at crafts shows, etc., complete with a package of literature on the plants used, how to care for the plants in the designs, how to install the design (very generally). Being available at the craft show to discuss the designs with people, answering any questions they have. Be available to do more personalized consultations or designs for people.
Landscape design is very expensive, and I don’t think it should be just available to rich people - most people who have yards are not rich, but I feel like everyone should have access to resources to make their yards more area-appropriate. We live in a semi-arid area; your typical grass lawn is just not viable here. We are looking at a water shortage in the future, but even if that never materializes, I am morally opposed to wasting water on mono-culture yards; plants are so wonderfully accommodating - if you plant the right plants in the right place, they’ll do the work for you.
My questions:
Would you guys be interested in something like this, if you saw it at a local craft show?
Would you buy a generic-type of landscape design like this for your own yard?
Are you familiar with how much these types of landscape design services normally cost?
How much would you be willing to pay for a front yard or back yard design, complete with information package?
Would you care if your design for your yard was coloured or just black-and-white? Would seeing the colours of the bushes and flowers on the design rather than just in the literature sell it for you?
I’m not looking to get rich at this; just make a little extra money and help get people’s yards right. I think there could be a huge market for these designs; I’m just not sure if people would pay for it, or how exactly to go about it.
Assuming you have any needed licenses and such to do that kind of thing, I think it sounds like a pretty good idea. I can see a market for that kind of thing with the yuppie/DINK crowd. No idea about pricing or financial viability as a business, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t sell something like that…
Can Trunk, with no design experience, but intimate knowledge of his surroundings do better than featherlou who is a better designer, but doesn’t have intimate knowledge of my surroundings.
I like the idea, but I really think it would be something you’d have to work out with local nurseries. I’d think a nice idea would be to sell the kit to local nurseries, and work out a deal where they carry the plantings you have in the design. Are you tight with the owners of any?
But, if I saw you at a farmer’s market, say, and flipped through a kit and thought, “where am I going to get all of this shit?” it would probably be a deal killer.
You might have alternate designs at each size: “The Tropical”, “The Desert”, “The Stone”, “The Pines”. I couldn’t imagine buying one in Baltimore and looking across the road and seeing a guy with the same design as me.
The yuppie/DINK crowd might already be paying for “real” landscape design.
featherlou is looking for a class below that. . .folks with enough disposable income and leisure to want to do it, but real designs can start at $500 and go up into the thousands.
I’d like the idea of a simple design that I could pay $25 for, and buy $250 worth of plants for, but there’s definitely a mental hurdle to cross.
By the wya
Not right now, because I’m already landscaped a little, but maybe otherwise.
Not riht now
Yes, somewhat. I worked for a landscaper/designer.
like I said. . .since it’s generic, maybe $25-$50 depending if I thought it was quality.
The overall look of the kit would be somewhat important here. It’s marketing. But “color” wouldn’t mean as much to me as “professional looking”. If it looked like some jerk with a pencil did it, that would turn me off.
If you want to sell, you have to show bright, realistic color photos of what you are selling–something that will grab my attention. A general diagram, with a vague sketch of a bush, won’t mean much to me. You would be forcing me to open a pamphlet, flip thru 5-6 pages and hunt for a picture of that type of bush, and then hold the pamphlet next to the sketch, and then try to imagine how that bush would look at my house.
That approach might work if you are sitting down with me in my living room and designing my lawn after I have already decided to hire your services. But it won’t work if I am standing at a booth in a noisy room full of people, not even sure if I want your services…
Would you guys be interested in something like this, if you saw it at a local craft
show?
Yep, designed for my zone.
Would you buy a generic-type of landscape design like this for your own yard?
Yep
Are you familiar with how much these types of landscape design services normally cost?
Free if you are williing to let the nursery do the planting - i.e. its a package deal. We haven’t bought the package.
How much would you be willing to pay for a front yard or back yard design, complete with information package?
$50-$100, what you are competing with is a good “zone” book with designs in it - not a personalized landscape designer. I have a couple of those and they go for around $20 - that’s where you want to invest your research.
Would you care if your design for your yard was coloured or just black-and-white? Would seeing the colours of the bushes and flowers on the design rather than just in the literature sell it for you?
Has to be color
I’d try and market at the home and garden show.
Good point - I think a lot of people see well-designed yards and think that they want their yard to look like that, but they have no idea how to do it (that’s where I was before I learned to do landscape design).
All the plants in my designs are in the local nursery’s catalogue. No point designing with plants people can’t get. Oh yeah, all plants are low-maintenance and drought-tolerant for the Calgary area. That’s part of what people would be paying for; my experience and education in what to use here and what to not use. There’s a great example of this down the street from me - two households used cedars to make a hedge in the front yards. I don’t use cedars in my designs because our local chinooks are death to cedars. The cedar hedges are slowly dying and look terrible.
And I’m not a jerk (but I do work with a pencil.)
Good information, people - positive and negative. Thanks.
I suggest you include a diagram for suggested irrigation gizmos - help out newbies out.
I’d want a sidewalk view, ie: what the person driving/walking by would see, a top-down view, too for placement of plants, a complete per-variety set of planting instructions and suggested substitutions (say I’m allergic to forsythia bushes, for example or if I’d just rather have red than yellow on the corner). Also, it’d be nice to have suggestions of where to add/subtract for yards not exactly right in shape or placement, ie: add another ABC bush here if you need to stretch this design, etc.
I’d go $25-50 for the right packet. Not any more than that. Price estimates for the plants themselves should be prominant on the cover - I don’t want to buy a beautiful packet of color designes, then find I can’t afford the plants in the pictures after I break the seal.
Hmmm…great idea. If I had a standard yard, I’d be interested in it. I think I’d try to market this to the major home builders in your area. Say a home builder has 5 models in a given subdivision. You could create half a dozen designs for each model. You could probably have a pamphlet stand in each model and let them choose one when they’re buying their home.
In my neighborhood, every house and yard is different. Meaning existing trees, shrubs, hardscape, etc. All of the houses are a different color. Some have brick bottom halves, some all brick, some all siding. Some with front walkways some without. But they are all the same shape and size.
Regarding color - I had a neighbor landscape my front yard. She didn’t put too many colorful plants in there but the ones she chose complemented my house’s color. I don’t see the point doing it in B&W.
If all of the houses you’re selling to have the same front yard layout and the same color pallet, like a builder’s development, then yeah this might take off.
We got a plan for our backyard, and got contractors to put it in (it required laying sprinklers) and we like it. No generic plan would have done.
I’d guess the choices would depend on a lot of things, such as how the beds have been rearranged and the color of the house. Are there really a bunch of generic areas to plant in?
I’m not sure what you mean by landscape installation. Does this include paths and borders, or just plantings in already prepared areas? In our house we started with a rectangle of lawn, a concrete walk around it, and dirt. Everything else got put in, and we bought a fountain to finish it. There is no way I’d ever have wanted to do that much work. On the other hand we play with the plantings in the already existing beds all the time.
But if you make the plans cheap and colorful enough people might buy them for fantasy wall decor.
I think it’s a terrific idea. Why couldn’t you sell it as a book, on the mass market, rather than trying to sell it at craft shows? (Though that does make me wonder if there’s anything comparable already out there on the market.) Myself, I have the world’s most nonstandard yard, so it probably wouldn’t help me, unless you had a whole section devoted to the nonstandard yard, with some general principles in it. But most Americans do have pretty standard yards, I think, and most of them are not that compelling, landscape-design wise. That says to me that your potential market is quite large.
In fact, it seems to me the only real danger is that your fellow landscape architects will get wind of it and gang up to have you whacked.
I would be interested in this type of information. We have a professionally landscaped yard that was there when we bought the house, so I wouldn’t need a new plan, just help maintaining the current one. Our flower beds are edged with upright interlocking posts that are rotting and I am not sure what to replace this barrier with.
I would be interested in more water resistant lawns and plants, especially perennials that flower in shady conditions. I am from Saskatchewan originally (which has sunny hot summers) and have not adapted to growing conditions in Calgary.
Yes, absolutely. In fact, while it’s a rather different ballgame, you might also want to consider doing some container garden “landscapes” as well, for those of us in the concrete jungle. I love the look of well-designed container gardens, with gorgeous color of foliage as well as flower and varied levels and summer plants sprouting and filling in as the spring ones die back and all that. I just have no idea how to do it myself. I like to plant, but I don’t know what to put where to have it all be pretty at the peak of its growth.
Basically, I want the Betty Crocker cake mix for gardens. Let me feel like I’m cooking by mixing in my own egg, but give me the all-in-one powder and the Captain Dummy Speak directions.
This year I found this Burpee Designed Herb Garden kit in Target for around $8 - actually cheaper than 7 packets of seeds. It has seeds, some labels and two different layout suggestions - one for a rectangular earth space and one for a round container. The fact that it had seeds in it was the clincher, but if I had seen a low-priced schematic for sale next to the seed rack, I’d have bought it and the seeds it called for at the same time.
As for price, as I don’t have a home right now it’s rather moot, but I would absolutely get a whole yard one for $25, probably get it for $50, consider it for $75, and stare at it wistfully before walking on at $100.
I would be more likely to get it at a garden center, next to a rack of whatever I needed, than at a craft show.
I work in landscaping so I’d personally have no use for such a service. However, to help answer some of your other stuff…
The company I work for once offered ‘free’ landscape design for small residences. It involved an initial site visit and consulation, a drawn design (B&W but hand done, not CAD) and a second consultation. If you purchased the plants from us (or paid to have us install it), you received a copy of the design for free. If you wanted just the plan, it ranged from $75-$250 depending on the size and complexity and, if you just thought it sucked, you could walk away with no obligation.
We got out of it because we were doing too much large-scale stuff to bother with small residences any longer but it was profitable in its own way. We didn’t offer any real “plant information packages” aside from what we told the customer verbally during the consults.
These were custom to the homeowner though – for a generic drawing, I don’t see where most would pay over the $35 mark for one. It’d have to match my yard pretty closely for me to take the time to tweak it into shape.
As far as licensing goes, in Illinois at least, anyone can call themselves a landscape designer. To be a landscape architect, you need a degree and to be licensed. Designers can’t sign off and stamp drawings for submission to the village/city but I doubt that affects small homeowners much (if at all).
I worked the local artisan / craft show a couple of years ago…as a neutral party just working for the organizers…a couple of the artisans told me that people would go in with digital cameras, take pictures of their stuff then make their own cheaper copies. So I’m thinking these designs would only sell once - then copied and distributed through the subdivision to other households who have the same yards, perhaps installing different plants, etc.
But it would be a great idea…the trouble you would have is controlling distribution.
Would you guys be interested in something like this, if you saw it at a local craft show?
Yes, but I think you would do better at home-and-garden shows.
Would you buy a generic-type of landscape design like this for your own yard?
Yes.
Are you familiar with how much these types of landscape design services normally cost?
No.
How much would you be willing to pay for a front yard or back yard design, complete with information package?
25% of what a custom design would cost.
Would you care if your design for your yard was coloured or just black-and-white? Would seeing the colours of the bushes and flowers on the design rather than just in the literature sell it for you?
It would have to be colored.
This feedback is excellent; for example, I know that a professional, custom landscape design for your yard is likely to cost you around $1000, but it is very useful to know that most of the people I would be aiming for as customers don’t know this. I could certainly tell people that who were browsing my designs this, but I could tell them anything, and they have no reason to believe me. What I’m seeing here is that most people wouldn’t see a lot of value in something that I have put a lot of effort into, and wouldn’t want to pay a lot of money for it. I could go two ways with this; charge more, or make the designs simpler. My husband’s idea is to have a range of designs, from simple little garden plots to full yards, with appropriate price ranges.
Interesting point about controlling distribution, Canadiangirl. There would be nothing stopping a developer from buying a design from me and incorporating it into his new subdivision. I guess that’s the risk anybody takes when they display and sell the fruits of their labour.
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