Meet Jessica & Eric Beck | Owners of Urban Garden

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jessica & Eric Beck and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jessica & Eric, what do you attribute your success to?
I think a lot of today’s ideas around success is this thought that it should happen quickly, or it’s not worth it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you have an idea, and it’s not making you six figures the first year, give up. Success for me is different. I believe that sticking with one thing, one goal, is really important. At 19, I was given an opportunity to either go to college, or try my hand at building and running a garden center from the ground up. As much as I wanted both, I knew I could only succeed if I put 100 percent into one thing. It has been 17 years since that decision was made, and while almost all of my life has changed drastically since then. Getting married to a professional landscaper that joined the business with every handyman skill you could ever want. Having a child. Countless hail storms, bad days, and plenty of times spent thinking, “why did we open a garden center in Colorado?”. In the end, I have always stuck with and done one thing fully. One thing the most. For me, and now us, Urban Garden is the singular thing we have worked on for over a decade together. We have stopped doing things that didn’t work. We have kept going when our entire outdoor inventory was destroyed (not once, but 4 times). We have went from 11 full time employees to 1 part time (thank you 2020). All in all, we truly know, and believe that what has kept us going and has made us successful is persistence, perseverance, and that we have fallen in love with our business enough that failure is no longer an option.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Urban Garden was started in 2007, and we always like to say it would have been easier if it had been a blank slate than the way it was. We saw the potential even though it was covered by years of neglect. It had previously been a garden center in the 1990’s, but had sat vacant for 10 years before it was purchased. Needless to say the entire 2 acres was in disarray. Weeds taller than people, the greenhouse was in need of a complete overhaul, not to mention over 16 20′ roll-off dumpsters full of trash had to be taken off the property before we could even start to see what we were working with. From 2007-2013 we struggled to survive as a business. We had to deal with a recession, a lack of funds, and our customer base just wasn’t growing the way we needed it too.
When my husband Eric came on board in 2013 was when things started to really shift towards a positive future. I have always heard that the first 5 to 7 years in business were the hardest, and like clockwork, as we got into year 8 things started to get better.
We started focusing on what worked (a good website, quality plants, a good pos). We re-worked the entire layout of the business, starting with a better spot for our check out, better parking, and signage everywhere. We tested price points, new products, and changed our logo during this time. We added shopping carts and made an experience out of shopping at our store.
I look back and realize, it’s not that year 8 is magic, it’s just that it takes about that long to figure everything out.

So who are we now? Urban Garden has become a premium quality garden center with your shopping experience being our biggest concern. We are known for high-quality plants and products, as well as the longest running Christmas Tree lot and Market in Boulder County. We focus on buying locally grown inventory and organic supplies. If you want the most beautiful hanging baskets, we have you covered. Need a massive houseplant, we have it! We are known for having a little bit of everything. Plus, there is always something new at Urban Garden!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
For food, check out Tip Top Savory Pies in Lafayette, they make the best chicken pot pie of your dreams. For drinks, Liquid Mechanics is a great local brewery. For shopping, downtown Lafayette and old town Louisville have so many cute boutiques, shop the full strip! Our go-to pizza is Cosmos, they make a massive 24″ pizza with slices twice the size of your head. For dessert, Cow-a-bunga Icecream is hard to beat.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
We have had endless support of raising our daughter, Summer, from my mom. She has been there for us for years, helping us through the throws of parenthood mixed with running a growing business that was hard to staff during 2021 and 2022. I, had to go back to work 10 days after having our daughter for Christmas tree season as we were short-staffed and my mom was there to watch her while I worked. Looking back, I have no clue how we did it, but once again, persistence is a heck of a thing.

Without the loyal and on going support of our customers we wouldn’t be able to exist, the out pour of support during Covid was incredible. We were allowed to stay open as a necessity based business and we didn’t take this lightly. We decided to put all of our offerings online so that we could offer curbside day 1 of the pandemic. We had over 1,000 orders placed within the first 2 weeks of opening our store online. This saved our business, to put it lightly, we felt the love!

Website: https://www.urbangardencolorado.com/

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