Lily Looks: Refreshing the Pot Lily Market

Chris Beytes

It was 2004 and business was booming for Marco and Peter van de Wetering. The Dutch brothers had started growing pot lilies in a corner of their parent’s cut flower greenhouse in 1990, when Marco was 22 and Peter was 17. And now, 14 years later, they had taken over the business and had invested millions of Euros to build a state-of-the-art greenhouse range.

Then, unexpectedly, sales started to decline. By 2005, revenues were down 35%. The bank, so happy when they were borrowing money, suddenly wasn’t so friendly anymore. It was a low point in the brothers’ career. Recalls Peter of that period: “We were a very new company, with high interest costs and high banking costs. We had to figure out what we were going to do the next few years to survive this.”

Old-fashioned
The van de Wetering family had been in the greenhouse industry in the Netherlands since the early 1960s, when Marco and Peter’s parents started van de Wetering Greenhouses. They started out in vegetables, then added cut flowers, like dianthus and freesia. By the early ’80s they had added cut lilies.

In 1988, while vacationing in Switzerland, 20-year-old Marco spotted some attractive dwarf potted oriental lilies. Pot lilies weren’t unusual in the Netherlands, but they were usually tall cut varieties manipulated to fit a pot. The varieties Marco had found were naturally dwarf. He immediately recognized their potential.

“He was so enthusiastic about the product,” Peter recalls, “He said, ‘We’re going into pot lilies.’”

Other growers weren’t quite as enthusiastic. “Everybody around us said it’s very hard to do; there’s not enough material and the material is not good, so we don’t believe in it,” says Peter. But Marco started out on his own, growing 1,000 pots in a corner of his parent’s greenhouse and showed them to potential customers asking them, “What do you think? Can this be something?”

The answer was yes and within two years business was booming. Peter joined Marco in 1990 as grower while Marco concentrated on sales. By 1996, they had expanded to 3 acres of production, producing Orange Pixie, Stargazer and Mona Lisa. They were perfecting their production techniques, learning how to produce a quality crop.

The market for van de Wetering pot lilies continued to grow. They bought out their parents, eliminated the cut flowers and even added contract growers. By 1999 they had three locations. The business was getting difficult to manage.

“We said to ourselves, ‘This is too much. We need to centralize everything and build a good automated nursery,’” recalls Peter.

In 2000, they bought a piece of land in Den Hoorn and began construction on a highly automated greenhouse range designed specifically for efficient production of pot lilies. “It was somewhere in the area of 7 or 8 million Euros we’d just spent—two young guys!” Peter says with a laugh.

Then the sales slump hit. They didn’t know what caused it at the time, but in hindsight it was clear.

“Sexier products had entered the market,” said Peter. Phalaenopsis orchids was one. Plus, the brothers had been doing the same assortment for 15 years—Orange Pixie, Mona Lisa, Stargazer. “We had gotten old-fashioned. We needed to refresh the product. We needed to find ourselves again, find our identity again.”

They determined that they had three options: Retrofit and start growing phalaenopsis, go back to growing cut lilies or—and this was the most difficult option—find an exclusive line of modern, exciting pot lilies.

Pictured Left: Marco in 1994, six years after he brought the dwarf pot lily idea back from Switzerland.
Center: Peter, in 2001, overseeing construction of their state-of-the-art new greenhouse.
Right: Peter, during the recent Flower Trials, with the variety Sunny Martinique, bred by Nick Mak.



Lily Looks
Enter fellow Dutch nurseryman Nick Mak of Mak Breeding. Nick had acquired all the pot lily genetics from the old Oregon Bulb Farms in America, along with the nursery BT Lilies. That gave him ownership of a large percentage of the world’s pot lily genetics. He had introduced a line of dwarf pot lilies called Six in a Row, named for their uniformity in habit and timing, and was advertising them to the industry.

The brothers realized immediately that this new material was exactly what they needed. Fortunately, Mak Breeding needed the brothers just as much. They formed a partnership in 2006. The deal was simple: Mak Breeding would breed. Marco and Peter would test the varieties and decide which were good enough to introduce, and they’d handle production and marketing.

They had the exciting new pot lilies they needed. Now for a name.

“We realized we were getting into a breeding program and probably a lot of varieties would not make it,” Peter says, “So it wasn’t interesting to us to go into variety names because varieties come and go. We needed a brand name and a very good one.” Some hard brainstorming with expert marketers resulted in Lily Looks, which has been their brand name ever since.

The growth and success of Lily Looks was aided by partnering with two bulb distribution companies, Zabo Plant and 2Plant. That put Lily Looks not just into finished pots, but into the fresh bulb business, as well. The partnership “clicked from the first day,” Peter says. “We made a long-term agreement on how we were going to work together and it worked.”

For Marco and Peter’s finished plant business, the Lily Looks genetics were “a breakthrough,” says Peter. “Since 2006 we have doubled our pot lily turnover. We have lowered our cost per unit. And we are able to grow year round.”

Lily Looks is 10 years old in 2016. How do they keep the brand fresh and avoid once again being old-fashioned?

“That’s always a risk,” answers Peter. “But considering that we are still breeding, we are a pretty young team, we are selecting lilies with good attributes, we are testing them at trial locations around the world and, most importantly, we are listening to our customers, I don’t think we will get old-fashioned anytime soon. But you can’t allow yourself to forget about the risk.” GT