Making the Dollar: Dennis’ Seven Dees Landscaping & Gardening Centers

Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Jason Pedersen, manager

84794 U.S. Highway 101, Seaside

Jason Pedersen had taken horticultural classes in high school and started at the Seven Dees Portland location about 13 years ago. Now he finds himself running one of the largest landscaping and garden centers on the North Coast. Seven Dees is open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. It can be reached at 503-738-6980. For more information, visit dennis7dees.com

What do you do?

We do everything from landscape maintenance and installation to garden center sales. (We sell) probably about 300 different types of plants, pottery, materials to take care of the plants stakes fertilizers, that sort. (We offer) plenty of advice, always free advice. And if the job is just too big, we can deliver, we can plant, we can renovate a whole yard. Mainly the idea is to just provide inspiration. We have customers that come down from Long Beach (Wash.) down to Manzanita, so a pretty good chunk of the Oregon Coast people come in from Jewell.

How did Dennis Seven Dees get started?

One of our owners actually has a house in Cannon Beach and really enjoys and loves the area and had noticed that this garden center was for sale. So they decided to buy. The timing was right, and we had already had landscape contracts and everything down here, so we decided to kind of do two birds with one stone, expand the garden center and have one down here. And it also gives us a home base for our landscaping. There are three (owners): Dave, Dean and Drew Snodgrass three brothers. The business originally started with their father in 1956. They purchased this one about seven years ago.

What is the volume of your business?

Customer count, (we can expect) probably about 400, 500 for the week. Sales of services is larger, I would say, than sales of (products) company-wide. Were actually the largest landscaping, garden center company in the state. And it actually all got started as a landscaping company. Definitely landscaping would be a bigger volume than the garden centers, as the company goes. Were a multi-million dollar landscaping company. (Our most popular products are) mainly annuals. Other than that, I would say animal repellents, as funny as it sounds mainly like deer repellent. Hanging baskets is probably by far the top seller that we have hanging baskets and summer color. Mid-April usually and goes through mid-July is the busiest time of year for any garden center.

How does the economy affect your business?

It sounds funny, but when the economy … started to go down, our business actually increased for a few years, and then weve actually been on kind of a down trend, just coming back to where we normally would be. As the economy is recovering, people are having more money to go and travel and spend money on other things instead of fixing up their yard and increasing the equity in their homes.?When the economy started going down, people didnt have the disposable money to, so they started investing in their landscaping and staycations instead of vacations and doing stuff around the house, which increased our business.

Edward Stratton