Buying Bulbs Online
By: Jay, Grin-eral Manager, Brent & Becky’s Bulbs
As any gardener knows, selecting the right bulbs is something that just can’t be done from sight alone. You need to touch them and feel them to be sure that you’re getting top-performers for your garden this year. And knowing this, how can it even be possible to buy bulbs online — where you’re unable to see the bulbs until they get to you? How can you be sure you’re getting a top-quality product if you can’t ensure it yourself?
Here at Brent & Becky’s Bulbs, we pride ourselves on the special care we take in what we select — a process that doesn’t just start at the point of purchase. In fact, our quality-assurance process starts long before you even see our products on our website.
Selecting the Best Product
In order to provide you with the best product from the very beginning, we make it our top priority to only select the best of the best. How do we do that? Well, we believe the only way to guarantee that is to see how they are growing and performing with our very own eyes. That’s why, every spring, we make our way to Holland, where we spend a week with our growers, walking the fields, and seeing how their stock is coming along. We also use the opportunity to discover anything new and exciting that we could you in the coming seasons!
Then, once we’ve made our selections based on what’s growing and performing well, we’ll ask to have trials shipped to us so we can grow them here in US soil. Our soil and our climate are much different than in the Netherlands, so we make sure to grow everything that we sell ourselves in our trial gardens first before they get to you. We closely monitor not only how they grow and perform, but also their bloom times, so we can double-check that exactly what we tell you is, indeed, what we say it is. We do it all ourselves first just to make sure that it really is right.
Streamlined, Sophisticated Ordering
Not only do we want to make sure we select the best product for you from the get-go, but we also want to make sure that finding what you’re looking for is as simple as possible. That’s why we spent a long time — while severely frustrating our web guy — to ensure we had a search engine as powerful and specific as possible, so you can find exactly what you want quickly and easily. This means if you’re wanting a mid-blooming daffodil, you can just select “daffodil” and “mid-spring” and find just that. If you just love the colors red and yellow, select “red” and “yellow” in the color section of our search engine, and we can find that for you, too. Get as specific as you want — from sun exposure to hardiness zones — our search bar can find it all for you from the start, so you don’t have to sift through the 700-odd products that we have in our fall planting catalogue alone.
If you prefer to talk to a person when placing your orders, we’ve made sure our people are just as full of information, too. Our customer service reps aren’t just hired to take orders — they’re gardeners themselves. In fact, all of our staff are! At the end of every season, we give each and every one of them an order form and they get to create a wishlist of things they’d like to have. Then, they take those items home and they grow them themselves so they can share their experiences with customers and speak first-hand on growing and care advice. On top of that, Brent, Becky or any other experienced staff, are close by in case a question can’t be answered with the utmost confidence.
Personalized Shipping
Unlike ordering from Amazon Prime, where you can get anything you desire within a day, our orders are shipped based on where people live. That means, in the spring, we don’t start shipping to Maine, Michigan, and Montana first because they’re still frozen! We start at the southernmost states — the ones that are thawed out enough — and work our way North because if you put them in the ground too early, they will either die or they’ll have poor performance. So, we watch the weather. And we don’t just open it up on the first day you get some warm weather, either. For instance, last week, Denver, Colorado had 80 degree days, but then a blizzard came through at the end of the week. We wait and we hold off until we know that your weather has definitely warmed up enough. It’s an extra step we take as people, not computers, that we make these personal decisions “on the fly” for your benefit.
Before your products even make it to the truck, they first have to make it into the box. Our wonderful warehouse staff, who also grow from their very own wishlist each year, are responsible for packing each and every order by hand. Unlike many of the other online bulb shops, we don’t use any machinery to pick and pack our bulbs. As our workers are picking someone’s order, they will look through each and every bag to make sure that there are the right number of healthy, decently-sized bulbs in every bag — no matter if it’s an order of 5 or 50. And if one doesn’t quite make the cut, it is immediately replaced with one that does. Each and every product that leaves our facility has a human being that determines that we are only putting out the very best that we have to offer.
Problem-Solving Your Problems
Lean business owners focus in on refining their processes to make everything work as quickly as possible to spend as little money as possible. They’ll ship as quickly as possible and give a refund as quickly as possible. However, we’d rather take every chance to do it right from the very beginning. We work hard to make sure that you’re getting the best and when you encounter an issue, we don’t just simply say, “We’re going to give you a refund.”
Instead, we ask the questions: How did they look when you got them? Where did you put them? What’s your soil like? What are the sun conditions like? What’s the moisture like? Do they get a lot of water when they’re dormant? Was it too dry or too cold? We walk through to try and find where something may have gone wrong to either figure out if we’ve done something wrong or to educate you on better planting practices to ensure better results in the future.
When it comes to buying bulbs online, it’s easy and it’s cheap to just send customers a random bag of bulbs and give them their money back if they have a problem. But we don’t agree with that. Our bulbs may come with a little extra cost, but they come with a whole lot of extra hands-on, personalized attention from real human beings — from the moment you start browsing to the moment it’s on your doorstep — all to ensure that you can get growing with confidence right from the get-go! Ready to get started? Browse our catalog now!
