When it comes to creating beautiful environments outside your home or your businesses, Platt Hill Nursery is a unique green-thumb powerhouse in Chicagoland to choose from. With a history of more than 40 years of operations, Platt Hill takes tremendous pride in helping its customers go from seed to spectacular.

“There is a mystery around plants,” explained Platt Hill Nursery President Graham Hill. “People are genuinely concerned that they are going to fail to cultivate plants. In that mystery is where our team and our customer service come in to really make people feel confident in what they’re doing and that they will find success in their outdoor space.”

Platt Hill Nursery has two locations in the western Chicago suburbs. There is an 8-acre store in Bloomingdale and a 26-acre store in Carpentersville. This is a full-service enterprise that not only sells a huge variety of plants, but also employs growers and landscape designers all under one umbrella.

“Our customers come from all over. We do bring customers all the way in from the city. We also bring customers all the way in from Wisconsin. We actually have some recurring customers coming out of Iowa as well. The diversity of plant selection plus the pricing that we offer is generally extraordinarily competitive as we’re growing a lot of our own product,” Graham said and then emphasized that roughly 80% of products sold at the nursery are plants, with their leading seller being evergreen trees.

The company was founded in 1980 by Graham’s father, Platt Hill “It’s an old family name from a great uncle that my grandmother loved and decided that my dad’s name should be Platt.”

The business has skyrocketed with growth in recent years, nearly doubling the size of its workforce since 2018.

Memories

Graham’s love for Platt Hill Nursery began when he was a young boy.

“We started coming here for Christmas photos at a very young age where our parents would dress us up in ridiculous Santa suspenders and make us hand out cookies to a lot of the customers,” said Graham with a smile. “It was a very enjoyable experience. We got to spend time with our dad during our Christmas tree season.”

Graham first cut his teeth with work experience in the family business at the age of 12.

“I was able to start working in the family business, even though it was only two hours a week, and I was moving annuals around. But it was a really cool experience, because I actually got my first taste of what work was like. The fun fact about it is the woman who trained me on how to sort and store annuals still works here today, and I still get a chance to work with her in a completely different context.”

The path to Platt Hill Nursery

After graduating from college, Graham joined the Marine Corps and served in the Marines for 10 years as an officer, with three years of his service spent in the conventional Marine Corps and his final seven years in special operations. Graham said he grew invaluable leadership skills in the military but that his deployment took a toll on his family.

“I met my wife through the military,” Graham stated. “We had a two-year-old at home. We were living outside of Washington, D.C., where we didn’t have a lot of family. The deployment was very hard on my wife. So, we made the conscious decision that it was probably not best for our family long-term to stay in the military. With that, I also had the opportunity to attend Georgetown’s evening MBA program and I started talking with my dad about the opportunity to come back and potentially replace him as the president of the company.”

The business

Hill acknowledged the tremendous competition with big-box garden stores and nurseries in the market place. He said Platt Hill Nursery remains a competitive player because of its unbending commitment to customer service and top-tier products.

“Our employees are highly trained horticulturalists who make sure that our target customers find success in their outdoor space,” Graham stated proudly.

“The box stores are really pushing that they have the lowest prices in town. More and more, we’re finding that from a price standpoint, because we’re growing our own product and there are no middlemen between us and the consumer, our prices are pretty well in line with what our competitors are charging.”

One of Platt Hill Nursery’s mission statements is “Grow confidently and inspire the confidence in our customers.” Graham believes that understanding who the customer is and what is important to them is key to retail success.

“We have actually dropped product lines that were hot sellers because our customers were struggling to keep them alive,” Graham stated. “We’ve also evaluated what makes things hard to keep alive and started to simplify things for the consumer, whether that be digitalized water timing devices, sprinkler hoses, or drip irrigation. This way, they can install it in their homes, so they can make plant cultivation as low maintenance as possible.”

Platt Hill’s customers

Graham said it is critical that customers know they can approach “their outdoor space without fear,” and that Platt Hill Nursery is their “partner” to help them at every stage of their growing journey.

Roughly 80 percent of customers at Platt Hill are female, according to Graham who said that their female consumers are “enticed by natural beauty” and want to be sure they “make their home feel like it’s well lived in.”

The rewards of a retail life

“I personally love being in retail because of the complexity of situations that it offers us,” Graham said. “Being a more specialized retailer, I get no more satisfaction than when a customer comes back the next year and personally seeks me out to tell me that they found success in their outdoor environment and they’re back to find more plant products. The look of enjoyment on their face and the passion that we’ve cultivated and really connected people to nature makes it all worthwhile.”

Graham said that the leadership of his team is growing the strength of this legacy business.

“The people that are continuing to evolve and help make this place thrive to better service our core consumer is what makes us unique and different. We have consistent engagement across all levels of the organization, whereas box stores are really just top-down directed approaches.

“We never stop striving for optimal customer service. When something goes wrong, we will go above and beyond to rectify any mistakes that we make. But keep in mind that, the people that you’re working with on the other end of retail are still people and they love serving the Illinois community day in and day out.”