Family flower busines thrives on the Web

Dan Pearson started selling his family's dahlias by the side of the road; today, a large portion of his business comes from the information superhighway the Internet.

"I'm doing the same job today as I did when I was 10 years old," Pearson said. "Not many people get to make a profit out of doing what they love to do."

Indeed, Dan's Dahlias is not only a solid business, he said it is proving recession-proof.

"In times of recession, people will stop traveling, they will stop eating out, but they will spend more money on things to do around their home," Pearson said.

The Internet has been a boon to Pearson's rural business. He said about 10 to 15 percent of his business comes from selling fresh cut flowers at the Olympia Farmers Market during dahlia season. This is the same job he did, the one that put him through four years of college, when he was a kid.

Pearson said he can fill up, and sell, a 15-foot box truck with dahlias each Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The fresh flowers aren't good for florists. They won't change once they're picked, Pearson said. If they are picked as a bud, they stay that way. That means the bright, personality-filled blooms can't be picked before they bloom for long-distance shipping.

The rest of Pearson's business comes from selling dahlia tubers. Pearson estimated about 50 percent of the tubers he sold were at three major garden and flower shows in Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. The rest are sold through online orders.

Pearson said he used to have a catalog, but printing and mailing it was a significant cost $5,000. In fact, he said, when he realized five years ago that he was spending more money distributing the catalog than it was bringing back in orders from the tear-out sheets inside them, he decided to pursue an online-only ordering system.

So Pearson sent a postcard to his catalog customers directing them to his Web site, and from then on, he has been all online.

But his catalog customers aren't the only ones he ships to. Going digital has opened his storefront up to the world. He has customers in all 50 states and a smattering of foreign countries, Pearson said.

"I have customers in the U.K., New Zealand, Canada," he said, amazed at how global his business had become.

Shipping to foreign countries means Pearson's dahlias have to be inspected by state agricultural agents, but that's a no-brainer trade-off.

Pearson gives partial credit for his success to his distinctive logo, a cow chewing on a dahlia. It was inspired by an incident that took place in 1994, when Pearson and his parents were out of town for a wedding and some neighboring cows broke through a fence and, in a matter of hours, decimated the dahlia crop, eating most of the flowers down to the nubs and a third of them with tubers attached.

"That meant one third of our crop could not grow back," Pearson said. It was a devastating loss for the young business.

"This logo is a symbol of all the obstacles Dan's Dahlias has had to overcome," Pearson said. Plus, it has a face, which distinguishes it from other dahlia vendor logos, which tend to be some sort of variation on a dahlia.

But dahlias have a lot of variations. Pearson carries more than 600 varieties of dahlias, which come in all colors of the rainbow except blue, with blooms less than two inches to over 10 inches in diameter, and in shapes that range from somewhat shaggy ("informal" in dahlia enthusiast parlance) to mathematically perfect spheres (of "poms").

Because dahlia varieties only have a life span of about 20 years, Pearson has to replace about 50 each year.

"I'm always on the lookout for new varieties," Pearson said.

Pearson is also a judge for dahlia competitions, including at the Grays Harbor County Fair.

"How many people can say that they are doing the same job they did when they were 10 years old?" Pearson asked. "It goes to show you that you can have a business, and you can make a profit, in Grays Harbor."

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Information from: The Daily World, http://www.thedailyworld.com