What do a lawyer, accountant, military intelligence manager, insurance executive and an information tech have in common?
They’re five friends from Mount Vernon (WA) High School Class of 1994 who decided to plunk down $1.5 million to buy a tulip farm (reasonably named Tulip Town) right before the pandemic hit!
[You can visit their website, Tulip Town which opens with a delightful overview video]
The friends decided to name their partnership the Spinach Bus Venture, after the rickety nicknamed “Spinach Bus” they rode during their summer jobs out to the agricultural fields in Skagit County Washington to pick spinach seeds and dig daffodil and tulip bulbs.
But they admit the timing of their purchase could NOT have been worse. Some background will make this clearer.
In Skagit County, about 1,000 acres of farmland are cultivated to grow tulip and daffodil cut flowers, along with annually harvesting over 20 million bulbs for gardeners.
About 500 of those acres are dedicated to tulips, which account for 75% of U.S. commercial production. Additionally, 75 million cut flowers from those fields and greenhouses provide for more than half of all U.S. floral sales. And the bulb industry produces $20 million in annual gross income.
But as impressive as those numbers are, the biggest generator of income for the two tulip farms remaining in Skagit County (Tulip Town with 30 acres and the much larger RoozenGaarde and Washington Bulb Co., with 500 acres of daffodils, 350 acres of tulips and 15 acres of greenhouses) comes from the annual Skagit County Tulip Festival.
It runs for the entire month of April and the paid admission, flowers, bulbs and souvenirs sales account for over 90% of their annual revenues for both Tulip Town and RoozenGaarde.
The Festival attracts over 400,000 visitors annually and pumps almost $65 million into the local economy from restaurants, hotels, etc. So you can imagine the panic the pandemic caused the new entrepreneurs with the cancellation of the 2020 Festival.
And then it was compounded with a dramatic drop in floral gifts given to Mom’s on Mother’s Day, one of the biggest flower-gifting days of the year along with Valentine’s Day, because of the pandemic-induced stay-at-home order. People simply were not going to risk heading out to buy flowers.
But the newbies had one advantage – they weren’t beholding to any “old” way of doing business.
Their first innovation last year was when Festival regulars started calling to say how disappointed they were about missing out on the 2020 celebration – but wondered if they could get some of their flowers anyway.
The previous owners had not focused on shipping actual bouquets, but they did have some boxes stored away. The new crew thought they’d get requests for 100 to 200 boxes of bouquets – but they did that in just their first day of taking orders!
When the season ended, they had boxed and sold over 8,000 bouquets! So a new business line was born.
While the pandemic was raging (thanks to Donnie’s incompetence), American patriots started searching for ways to show their appreciation to frontline workers. The newbies thought people might be happy to send a bouquet of tulips as a donation or statement of support. That’s when their “Color for Courage” came into being – and they took more than 4,700 orders for a $15 bouquet.
Then one of their group thought they could keep in touch with the regular Festivalgoers with a 360-degree app letting them visit the fields that they couldn’t view in person.
All these new ideas kept their heads above water during the pandemic, and they are looking forward to once again welcoming visitors back this spring, although at a reduced capacity with mask and social distancing required.
So from April 1st to the 30th (and maybe into May if the weather holds) there’ll be lots of smiles from taking a tour of Tulip Town. You just won’t be able to see them under the masks!
EPILOGUE
While not wanting to diminish our country’s Tulip Festivals this spring, I think we’d all agree that Holland holds the title for tulips. I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Amsterdam twice – once in the fall and once in the spring. And their tulip gardens are truly a site to behold! So I’ll close with some of their stupendous displays:
Still, it’s hard to beat a gorgeous floral American sunset in Skagit County … 
