The Future Of Niche Retailing Is Building Brands Around Tribes

The Future Of Niche Retailing Is Building Brands Around Tribes

Research has shown that there is robust group of one hundred million consumers who spend $19 billion ... [+] annually on gardening as a hobby, "it's a pocket of enthusiasts that's hiding in plain sight, growing their own kale." Millennials' adulthoods have been defined by political decent, economic recession, and massive amounts of debt, caused by the staggering costs of higher education. My eldest, thirtysomething daughter fits that bill. And like many other of her cohorts who look to passion projects to balance their stressed lives, she chose gardening. From winter seedlings to raised planting beds she turned her urban Minneapolis backyard into a flourishing vegetable garden, growing the entire alphabet's worth of greens. So, it was not a complete surprise reading excerpts from a National Gardening Association's (NGA) survey indicating that a quarter of all gardening expenditures of the $52 billion gardening industry came from millennials, despite their having less wealth than older generations. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning found that "gardening supports high emotional wellbeing, including feelings of happiness and meaningfulness." And a 2021 survey found that gardening several times a week was associated with "higher levels of perceived wellbeing, less