Pennsylvania Woman Sells Garden Web Site to California Company
Apr. 20 (The Patriot-News/KRTBN)--She turned down an opportunity to become the
"Martha Stewart of plants," but a Linglestown woman says that's just as well.
Cinda Baley, also known as "The Plant Woman," said Wednesday that she has agreed
to sell her findplants.com Web site to E*Garden.com, a subsidiary of San
Francisco-based U.S. Home & Garden Inc. The value of the stock-and-cash deal was
not disclosed, but Baley will continue to operate the site.
"We're very excited," Baley said. "By joining E*Garden.com, we will make it
easier for buyers and suppliers of lawn and garden products to do business and
exchange information with the speed of light."
And just as importantly for Baley, 52, it will enable her to pursue her
passionate love affair with plants in the relative anonymity she prefers.
FindPlants.com will become part of a vertical market for the horticultural
industry, offering growers and professional plant buyers a way to do business
more efficiently. The site offers 10,000 types of plants from 140 growers.
"We expect the acquisition of findplants.com to enhance E*Garden.com's ability
to attract key strategic industry partners to facilitate the rapid achievement
of a critical mass of lawn and garden industry participants," said Robert
Kassel, chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Home & Garden.
In accepting the deal, Baley spurned -- politely -- an offer from midstate
venture capitalists Jan Rumberger and Martin L. Schoffstall to set her up as an
independent company with an eye toward a public stock offering.
"Jan said to me, 'We'll make you the Martha Stewart of plants,' " Baley said.
"Oh my gosh, I don't want to go there. I'm about plants, not about publicity. It
was a very gracious offer, but it would have taken me away from my passion. My
heart would not have been in it."
Baley has a degree in horticulture from the University of Connecticut. She moved
to Harrisburg in 1977 after soaring energy prices devastated the greenhouse
industry and made it difficult for her to find work in her field.
She created her database of plant growers eight years ago and started
findplants.com three years ago. It has not been easy going, Baley said, because
the nursery industry is profoundly conservative and resistant to change.
"There's been a definite difference in the last year," she said. "The number of
hits (on the Web site) have doubled, as have membership applications."
In the past, professional plant buyers operated "by brain or by print" in
locating suppliers of particular plants or shrubs they needed for a corporate
customer, she said.
"This is a far more efficient way to do it," Baley said of her Web site. "The
efficiencies will be remarkable. That's my goal."
Last August, Baley decided the horticultural world was not going to beat a path
to her door on its own, and that she needed investors to help expand
findplants.com and get the message out.
Dwayne Beach, a vice president at Northwest Savings Bank, where Baley is a
customer, put her in touch with Schoffstall, whom he knew from long ago.
She praised Schoffstall as someone who "was folks" and was never "demeaning or
arrogant." He and Rumberger convinced her that she had a good business model and
could pull it off. But Baley hesitated, not signing on to Rumberger's vision of
her as a celebrity purveyor of plant wisdom.
At one point, Baley was about to sign with yet another potential buyer whose
identity has not been disclosed. Then she received a call from a friend in North
Carolina who had mentioned her to representatives of E*Garden.com at a garden
show and seen their excitement.
That led to the deal this week. Baley believes her intimate knowledge of the
"vagaries and peculiarities" of the nursery business is what attracted
E*Garden.com.
"It's not just knowing the plants, but how the industry works," she said.
Baley considers herself a "dot-com oldie," an "old whippersnapper" instead of
one of the younger variety that venture capitalists typically deal with.
U.S. Home & Garden's stock (Nasdaq: USHG) closed Wednesday at $2.56 1/4 cents a
share, down 6 1/4 cents. The stock has traded in a range from $2 to $7 a share
over the past year. |
