About Us
One day I was doing the shopping at the Checkers Hyper in Fourways Mall when I bumped into Terrence, who used to be our warehouse manager in the SS days and unfortunately then had to be retrenched when we sold the brand, he mentioned that he still hadn't found a job and wanted to know if I could help him get a job because he was in a bad way financially... so I decided to help him find a job!After a few months of getting the odd temp job here and there it felt like we were getting nowhere... so I thought I'd put my web design skills to good use and make a website that could possibly bring in enough money to pay him some kind of salary... and that's exactly what we did... obviously I had a passion for seeds, so that's where we started... I registered a domain called GardenGoods.co.za and built an ecommerce site that I ran on the side (whilst still working for Sports Horizons.)
Within a couple years of selling Kirchhoffs seed packs, Hadeco bulbs and other gardening products I decided to leave the family business and turn this online shop into a proper business. We rented the tennis court at my mother-in-law's house and turned the cottage next to it into an office for Terrence and myself, and in August 2008 we officially registered Garden Goods CC... let's do this!!
Turns out that things didn't always go to plan, and one Spring I ordered R30,000 worth of Hadeco bulbs, but without me really thinking about it, or checking the catalog properly, and it turns out that we only had a week to sell them before they were no longer able to be planted... unfortunately bulbs are not the kind of product that you can just return... so, we had almost 30 grand worth of bulbs that we couldn't sell... what to do??
Ha ha... the only thing we could do was to plant them... and from this 'silly mistake' (although I don't believe in mistakes, it's all part of the master plan) our actual plant nursery was started!