The Grass is Greener

The Scotts Co. (Marysville, Ohio), the world’s largest manufacturer of lawn care products, has purchased Smith & Hawken Ltd. (Novato, Calif.) from a private equity consortium. Scotts will pay $72 million for the cataloger and retailer of upscale garden products and will assume $14 million in debt. The deal is expected to close Oct. 1, 2004.

According to Michele Farabaugh, Smith & Hawken’s senior vp of marketing, the deal will help both companies broaden their core product niches. For Scotts, it provides an opportunity to expand beyond staples such as pesticides and lawn seeds to more-discretionary products favored by affluent consumers. And it will widen the distribution of Smith & Hawken merchandise beyond its 56 stores in the U.S. Scotts plans to sell branded Smith & Hawken garden tools, teak furniture, and ornaments to big-box retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s.

This is an expansion of Smith & Hawken’s testing of concept shops, earlier this year, at select independent garden centers.

Smith & Hawken was founded in 1979 by Dave Smith and Paul Hawken, who sold the company in 1993 to CML Group. CML declared bankruptcy in 1999 and sold Smith & Hawken to an investment firm, DDJ Capital (Wellesley, Mass.), and the State of Wisconsin Investment Board (Madison, Wis.).