What Are Your Customers Looking For This Spring?

Introducing the Sunrise Season Intelligence Brief — and a free download to start your season right.

Most garden center owners go into spring with a strong instinct about what will sell.

That instinct is built from decades of experience, conversations with growers, and knowing your local market better than any algorithm ever will. It’s real, and it matters.

But instinct alone doesn’t tell you that broccolini has become this year’s breakout vegetable on social media, that customers are arriving with TikTok-inspired ‘untamed garden’ aesthetics in their heads, or that Lowe’s kicked off its SpringFest promotion on March 26 with $1 annuals and free same-day mulch delivery for loyalty members.

That’s market intelligence. And for most independent garden centers, it’s the missing piece.

The big boxes have entire teams tracking consumer trends and adjusting their floor sets accordingly. Independent centers have you — and until now, not much else.

That’s what we’re changing.

Introducing the Season Intelligence Brief

Three times a year — Spring, Summer, and Fall — Sunrise Marketing will publish the Season Intelligence Brief: a researched, written, and designed document built specifically for independent garden center owners.

Each edition arrives before your buying and planning decisions are made, not after. It’s designed to be read in one sitting and referenced throughout the season. Think of it as the kind of intelligence briefing that used to require either a dedicated analyst or an expensive monthly subscription — delivered in a format a busy owner can actually use.

Each brief includes five sections:

The Trend Watch — what consumer culture, social media, and design press tell us customers will want this season.

The Customer Conversation Report — what gardeners are searching for, posting about, and asking at the bench right now.

The Competitive Scan — what Home Depot and Lowe’s are running, and exactly where independent centers win.

The Talking Points Sheet — ready-to-use language for staff conversations and customer communications.

The 30-Day Action Checklist — five specific, sequenced moves to make before the next major shopping window.

What’s in the Spring 2026 Edition

Here’s a taste of what we found.

Grocery prices are projected to rise faster than the 20-year historical average for fresh vegetables in 2026. Customers are noticing — and they’re responding not by cutting back on gardening, but by going upscale with edibles. Raised bed combinations, ornamental herb gardens, and edible-ornamental pairings are the opportunity this season. Stock them prominently and merchandise them as lifestyle choices, not just produce.

The soft, blush-and-sage color palette that dominated garden retail for the past several years is giving way to something richer. Deep purples, jewel tones, dark foliage — this is where consumer taste is moving in 2026, driven by design press and TikTok garden content alike. If your container displays are still leading with pastels, there’s an opportunity to get ahead of this before Mother’s Day.

And on the competitive front: Lowe’s SpringFest ran March 26 through April 22 with $1 annuals, mulch at five bags for $10, and free same-day delivery for loyalty members. Home Depot ran a parallel Spring Black Friday event. Both chains are competing on price, volume, and convenience.

Neither of them can tell a customer which Heuchera combination will look beautiful against her specific fence color. Neither knows her name. That’s the opening — and the Spring Brief walks you through exactly how to widen it.

Download the Spring 2026 Brief — Free

We’re making the Spring 2026 Season Intelligence Brief available as a free download. No signup required. Just open it, read it, share it with your team.

 

  →  Download the Spring 2026 Season Intelligence Brief  ← 

 

It’s six pages. You can read it over coffee. And if it changes even one decision you make between now and Memorial Day, it will have been worth your time.

What’s Coming Next

The Spring 2026 Brief is the first in what will become a three-times-a-year resource for independent garden center owners — published each season before the major planning and buying windows.

Starting with the Summer 2026 edition, we’ll be offering the Season Intelligence Brief as a paid seasonal subscription. We’re still finalizing the details, but the pricing will be structured for independent garden centers — straightforward, seasonal, and a fraction of what a traditional market intelligence service would cost.

If you want to be among the first to know when the Summer Brief is available — and get early access pricing — reply to this post or reach out to us directly.

The centers pulling ahead this spring aren’t necessarily busier. They’re better informed. This is how you get there.