Why I Spent 35 Years Building to This

I want to tell you something I don’t say often enough: I didn’t build the Sunrise app platform because I thought it would be a good product to sell. I built it because I watched everything else stop working — slowly, then all at once — and I couldn’t stand watching garden center owners keep pouring their energy into the wrong places.

That’s not a pitch. That’s thirty-five years of paying attention.

It Started With Newsletters

When Sunrise Marketing got its start, we were producing two-color newsletters. That was the tool. You printed them, you mailed them, and if you did it right, people read them. Then came color postcards — a real leap forward. Then websites. Then social media. Then email marketing.

At every stage, we adopted the new channel because it worked better than what came before. That’s always been the job: find the most effective way to connect a garden center with its best customers.

But one of the tools I’m proudest of didn’t come from a new channel at all. It came from understanding how customers actually behave.

Bonus Bucks — and the Loyalty Lesson

Before the app, we developed and printed Bonus Bucks for our garden center clients. The concept was straightforward but the results were powerful: give them away when you’re busy, have customers bring them back when you’re not. It was a loyalty mechanism designed to smooth out the feast-or-famine rhythm that every independent garden center knows too well.

Bonus Bucks worked because they were tangible, time-aware, and tied to behavior. A customer who earned them felt recognized. A customer redeeming them came back on a Tuesday in July instead of disappearing after Memorial Day weekend.

When we built the app platform, one of the first things we did was take Bonus Bucks digital. Same proven strategy — drive loyalty, manage traffic, reward your best customers — but without the printing costs, the handling, or the paper trail. What had been a physical product became a digital relationship tool, and it got better in the process. We could track redemptions, time the offers, and segment who received them.

We didn’t abandon what worked. We found a better vessel for it.

That’s the through-line of everything Sunrise has built. Not chasing novelty. Carrying forward what works and finding smarter ways to deliver it.

The Slow Erosion

Meanwhile, the channels everyone else was betting on started working against us.

Social media didn’t die overnight. It crept. The algorithms tightened. Organic reach — the reach you earned by building a following — quietly collapsed. Garden center owners who had spent years growing their Facebook pages suddenly found their posts reaching a fraction of their audience unless they paid to boost them. The effort stayed the same. The return didn’t.

Email open rates followed a similar arc. Inboxes filled up. Filters got smarter. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection scrambled the metrics we’d relied on. A channel that once felt like a direct line to your customer started feeling like shouting into a room where half the people had left.

Radio, television, newspaper — those had been fading for years. But social and email were supposed to be the answer. For a while, they were.

I watched garden center owners working harder than ever on marketing that was returning less than ever. That’s not a sustainable equation.

And through all of it, I kept thinking the same thing: what if that effort went somewhere it couldn’t be taken away from you?

The Quiet Bet We Made in 2012

We started developing the Sunrise app platform in 2012. At the time, most independent garden centers didn’t have a serious social media presence yet. The tools that would later frustrate so many owners hadn’t even peaked. From the outside, it probably looked early.

It was. But what we were building wasn’t a reaction to a trend — it was a response to a pattern I’d been watching for a long time. Every channel that became popular eventually became crowded, then commoditized, then controlled by someone else’s algorithm or pricing model. The house always changed the rules.

An app is different. When a customer downloads your app, they’re making a deliberate choice. They’re inviting you into the most personal device they own. That relationship belongs to you — not to a platform, not to an algorithm, not to a quarterly earnings call in Silicon Valley.

That’s what we were building toward.

Think About Karen

I’ve written about Karen before in this newsletter. She’s the customer I keep coming back to — a loyal, high-value garden center shopper who knows what she wants and comes back season after season. She’s not a coupon-chaser. She’s not a bargain hunter. She’s the customer your business is actually built around.

Karen doesn’t want to hear from you every other day. She’s busy. Her inbox is full. Her social feed is a blur. But when she gets a well-timed push notification — one message that tells her the dahlias she loves just came in, or that this weekend is perfect for dividing her perennials — she pays attention. She acts.

That’s the power of a channel she chose to be on. And that’s the power you throw away when you treat it like every other broadcast tool.

The app isn’t just a delivery mechanism. It’s a relationship. Push notifications, SMS, email — each channel plays a specific role. Email informs. Push inspires. SMS incentivizes. When you use them with intention, and with restraint, Karen stays engaged. When you blast her because you can, she quietly tunes out.

What I’m Actually Selling

Here’s the honest version of what Sunrise is offering: not more marketing. Better marketing. A platform built from the ground up for independent garden centers, with the specific customer relationships you have in mind — not the generic consumer base a big-box retailer is chasing.

The segmentation tools we built let you speak differently to your loyal regulars than to your first-time visitors. The push notification cadence is designed to protect the channel’s value, not maximize volume. The SMS capability is there for moments that deserve it — a one-day sale, a frost warning, a limited quantity of something special.

Every feature was built around a single question: what does a customer like Karen actually want from a garden center she trusts?

You’ve spent decades building something worth trusting. The platform should reflect that.

I’ve been in this industry for thirty-five years. I’ve watched the tools evolve. I’ve helped garden centers adapt at every stage. And I can tell you with confidence: the app platform we’ve built is the most significant tool I’ve ever had to offer.

Not because it’s new. Because it’s right.

If any of this resonates — if you’ve been feeling the diminishing returns on channels that used to work — I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Contact Me. That’s not a call to action. It’s an invitation.