Bellerose Greenhouse
Gardening Made So Easy, You “Just Add Gardener”
Sophic Design partnered with Backyard Discovery to develop a turnkey greenhouse for garden enthusiasts
Prefabricating Outdoor Enjoyment
For more than 30 years Backyard Discovery has been making and selling prefabricated structures that bring enjoyment to backyards and families all over the United States. Their collection of playsets, gazebos, and pergolas are shipped directly to their customers with everything included to build a fun and beautiful backyard structure that is sure to enhance any backyard gathering.
All structures ship to customers with hardware and fasteners included as well as pieces cut to size and pre-drilled for quick and easy assembly so you can set up and enjoy your own personal oasis right at home in the backyard.
Capabilities & Advantages
Because of their e-commerce business model, Backyard Discovery had to develop unique capabilities related to delivering not only high-quality products, but also big, bulky, and heavy shipments quickly and safely to their customers’ front door. They were able to do so by building strong relationships with suppliers and also by developing design and shipping systems that leveraged common hardware, materials, and parts across multiple product lines to help streamline new product development and increase order fulfillment efficiency.
By developing these unique resources and capabilities Backyard Discovery has been able to enter new verticals within the outdoor structures market, grow their product line, and substantially increase revenues.
Greenhouse Opportunity
Custom greenhouse
Backyard Discovery partnered with Sophic Design to explore greenhouses as a strategic new product opportunity. They believed they could compete in the entry-level greenhouse market because it was characterized by low-quality hoop structures and inadequate DIY solutions that had poor stability and air ventilation.
Hoop-structure greenhouse
Because their company lacked experience in this category, Backyard Discovery asked Sophic Design to help them research and develop new greenhouse concepts that could stand out and give them a strategic advantage by aligning with their existing capabilities and resources, filling current gaps in the greenhouse market, and satisfying the unmet needs of aspiring buyers.
DIY greenhouse
Research Outcomes
It didn’t take long before we realized that greenhouses are grossly misunderstood by both the people who are buying them and the people who are making them. We began the research process by speaking with professional growers about what a greenhouse should be and afterwards we spoke with future buyers about what they expected a greenhouse to be. What we found is that a misalignment exists between consumer expectations and the realities of greenhouse growing.
What people Expect From a greenhouse
What we found is that most people expect to be able to grow their favorite fruits and vegetables in a greenhouse throughout the entire calendar year, or at least lengthen out the growing season from the early spring months to the late fall months. Additionally, they expect their plants to grow and mature inside the greenhouse from the time they are planted to the time they are harvested.
The realities of temperature maintenance
However, the reality of owning a greenhouse is that maintaining an internal temperature that is conducive to growing throughout the entire year is extremely difficult. Temperatures inside of a greenhouse can soar well above 120° F without proper ventilation in the summer months and can plummet well below freezing without deploying active or passive heating methods during the winter months.
We learned through expert interviews that the two most common temperature maintenance problems encountered by first-time greenhouse owners are 1) structure size and 2) ventilation. We also learned that adding effective heating methods is difficult and that while most users like the idea of winter growing they are not willing to pay for it.
structure size
Small residential greenhouses trap large amounts of UV energy causing them to quickly overheat during the day scorching the plants (even in cooler months). The most common footprint size recommended by the experts we spoke to was 10 ft x 15 ft to help disperse the collected UV energy across a larger volume.
“Greenhouses get hotter than people realize, and small greenhouses heat up quickly”
Ventilation
All of the professionals we interviewed recommended that smaller greenhouses incorporate forced-air ventilation systems that use fans, sensors, and other automated features to exhaust warm air and regulate temperatures especially during the summer months.
“I see people buy small greenhouses and by the second or third year it’s a storage shed”
Heating Methods
Without insulation greenhouses cannot retain their heat so most effective heating methods use either geothermal systems or large water barrels to store and distribute thermal energy and warm plants at night. Building these systems requires additional effort, skill, and resources that most users are not willing to invest in.
“You can access a lot of thermal energy by digging down 4-5 ft and building your greenhouse on top”
Strategy & Validation
Although Backyard Discovery possessed unique strategic advantages in the prefabricated outdoor structures industry, they also knew that greenhouses was a new market and that entering this space would come with its own set of risks that needed to be considered carefully. To help mitigate this risk, we set out to better understand greenhouse owners and identify existing gaps in the market related to their unmet needs. We also gathered data to inform the feature set and pricing strategies that would give the Backyard Discovery greenhouse its best chance to succeed at launch.
Market Opportunities
Based on the user and market research data, it was safe to assume that Backyard Discovery’s existing model of delivering high-quality prefabricated outdoor structures would be most appealing to first-time greenhouse buyers who were already serious gardeners. This data also suggested that first-time greenhouse buyers are cost-sensitive based on their lack of experience using a greenhouse.
However, owning a greenhouse that included the features identified as being critical to success (larger size and automated forced-air ventilation) required consumers to spend extra money on premium offerings that were beyond their purchasing threshold. Conversely, budget-friendly prefab greenhouses were typically low-quality and devoid of meaningful features so first-time buyers had to choose between purchasing an inferior product or investing their time, effort, and money into a DIY greenhouse.
A strategic opportunity existed for Backyard Discovery to develop a high-quality, prefabricated greenhouse at a reasonable price. This strategic balance of high quality and price is what Backyard Discovery would dub “Masspirational” and refers to a product that is simultaneously aspirational in its beauty and quality yet affordable to the masses. However, to capitalize on this opportunity we needed to identify the right combination of product features and cost threshold that would resonate with gardeners looking for a high-quality greenhouse.
Feature Set Validation
Product size and automated forced-air ventilation were identified via research as critical features for maintaining proper greenhouse temperature but more work was needed to validate that these critical features would be seen as valuable by consumers. We also needed to identify the best product feature set by measuring the perceived value of other potential features such as shelving, organization, workspace, etc.