From home and garden shows to your neighbor's gorgeous backyard, odds are, if you are from Cincinnati, you've been admiring Natorp's award-winning landscape designs for most of your life.

The Company: Natorp's

• Industry: Landscaping
• Location: Mason, OH
• Employees: 200+
• Owners: Kyle and Nikki Natorp

Natorp’s is a nursery wholesaler for landscapers, landscape suppliers, and retail consumers.

What sets Natorp's apart is their ability to keep up with the times. A single ad for landscaping services placed more than 100 years ago has since blossomed into a 334-acre nursery, an award-winning landscape design firm, and a sprawling outlet store. Kyle and Nikki have diligently overseen the business as it has grown, constantly finding ways to improve operations and inventory management.

We have been working with Natorp's for over a decade as they have adapted their regional empire to thrive in an increasingly-digital world.

The Challenge: Build an online store from scratch that's structured similarly to their brick-and-mortar location.

Throughout their years with the business, Kyle and Nikki developed a keen understanding of how buyers—both retail and wholesale—pick out the right plants to take their landscaping to the next level. With hundreds acres of inventory and fields full of plants still being grown, the Natorp’s team had crafted an in-store experience to help shoppers find exactly what they are looking for.

For Natorp’s, undergoing digital transformation presented a unique challenge: how can we create an online browsing experience that can match the in-store process, incorporate complex inventory management, and allow for eventual order fulfillment? An undertaking of this scale had not yet been done in their industry, and Natorp’s was blazing a trail into uncharted territory.

As their digital marketing partner, we were excited to help Kyle and Nikki tackle this challenge.

The Strategy: Create an online store while solving difficult operational and usability hurdles for their customers.

Because of the novelty of this kind of project, we took extra care to inject creativity and thoughtfulness every step of the way. We listened to them, challenged them, and brainstormed with them, making sure we could deliver exactly what they needed.

The Tactics: Results-driven development

1. Learn the process. We began this journey by taking time to learn the way homeowners shop for plants, and then we worked together to create an online tool that was easy and fun to use.
2. Incorporate inventory management. To be successful, we needed to deliver accurate inventory details from Natorp's complex management platform. The USDP development team built a web application to display exactly what products were available.
3. Add in eCommerce. As eCommerce got more and more dominant in the market, we added payment and fulfillment functionality to turn the online plant library into a fully-functioning online store.
4. Repeat the process for wholesale. To accommodate the wholesale channel of their business, we created a version of the plant library modified to fit the buying needs of commercial customers.
5. Continuously optimize. In the years since developing the plant library, we have worked closely with Kyle and Nikki to make enhancements to the system, to handle data differently, and to adapt to growth. 

The Results:

Natorp’s ongoing digital transformation has cemented them as the dominant garden center and nursery in the Cincinnati region. This attitude of continuous innovation helped Natorp’s to thrive during the pandemic, when regulations changed the way in-person business could be conducted. Now, entering into our second decade of partnership with Natorp's, USDP continues to support Kyle and Nikki as we find new ways to improve their 100 year-old family business.

"US Digital Partners helped us to create a seamless online shopping experience for our customers, leveraging our internal ERP system data to integrate our inventory and business processes into a beautiful ecommerce platform"

— Kyle Natorp

We are excited to help Natorp's spread nature's beauty. Happy Spring!

Learn more about Natorp's