Flora Tropicana Aquatics
Going With The Flow
By Janis Dice
He was earning a bachelor of arts degree in accounting and finance at Sacramento State. She was a family-law paralegal working in the Bay Area. Together, Marco and Wendy Tjaden in 2002 created the
Flora Tropicana Aquatics destination garden center, specializing in fish, ponds and aquatic plants.
Marco Tjaden is a serial entrepreneur who started with a lemonade stand, graduated to a fruit stand, offered tennis lessons, rented jet skis and worked as a landscaper before getting hooked on exotic fish and water gardens. The pastime evolved into a business Marco started 12 years ago in the backyard of his parents’ home on Jackson Road in Sacramento. He cultivated plants and fish, loading orders into his pickup truck for delivery to garden centers and landscapers throughout Northern California.
Noting the lack of aquatics-supply shops in the territory, he knew there was an underserved pool of customers. He dove into the business on a bigger scale, telling himself, “Either I’m going to make it, or I’m not. But I’m not going to just continue this as a hobby.”
Around that time, Marco and Wendy met by chance at a Sacramento restaurant. She had driven up from the Bay Area to have dinner with a friend. “But I met Marco and never went back.”
After marrying, Wendy gave up law to join Marco’s aquaculture venture. “He just needed someone by his side to have the confidence to go bigger and better,” she says. “I had zero interest in gardening, but I knew Marco needed me to be a partner in the business. That’s just one of those marital sacrifices you make. But, looking back, I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”
Four years ago, they purchased five acres on Grant Line Road in Elk Grove. “We started, literally, in a cow field and spent the first year picking up ‘cow pucky’ 16 hours a day,” Marco recalls. “People always ask, ‘How can you stay married and work together?’ ” Wendy notes. “But if you keep the core reason — your future together — in mind, then you can make it through anything.”
From Pucky to Egyptian PapyrusThe pasture now holds a 4,000-square-foot retail/administration building, eight display ponds and 40 greenhouses. Walkways link fish tanks with water beds full of lilies, lotus and Egyptian papyrus as well as bonsai gardens, rock fountains and hothouses holding more than 100 varieties of aquatic hybridized plants. Colorful displays of garden ornaments, statuary and bowls edge the paths.
Light jazz music piped through outdoor speakers competes with the sound of burbling water coming from the exhibits, and the smell of moist vegetation underscores the difference between this nursery and traditional garden stores.
Inside the retail center are waterfall- and pond kits and a full line of maintenance supplies. Also, there are wall sculptures, copper fountains and other works of garden art that Wendy seeks out from crafters throughout the state.
Claiming to be the largest water-garden nursery in Northern California, Flora Tropicana Aquatics’ biggest annual growth spurt, a sales increase of 400 percent, was catalyzed by the retail center’s opening four years ago. The past two years, business increased 100 percent over previous seasons. Marco expects to do $2 million in sales this year, which is not bad for a four-month season: “It’s like the regular nursery industry: People don’t come out if it’s cold or 100-degree weather.”
Marco credits in-house plant propagation and a three-tier sales and pricing structure. “If we did wholesale only, we couldn’t survive,” he admits. “We had to diversify.”
Serving wholesalers, retailers and landscapers, the business also assists homeowners directly. A people person, Marco says helping consumers gives him the most satisfaction. “I love working with homeowners, and the retail side is where I feel I can best control my own destiny. Retailers change buyers or get new product lines and suddenly they aren’t buying from you anymore. With homeowners, you establish a relationship and they keep coming back.” He claims his customers return from the Bay Area, Southern California and even Oregon to seek advice and purchase uncommon products amid an aesthetic environment.
“There’s no place like it,” Marco declares. “That’s what we’re marketing and leveraging.” Adding Japanese maple and bamboo trees to the inventory and maximizing internet sales are the couple’s next priorities. But both see career changes in the future. Marco thinks in five to seven years he will be “doing something completely different.” Wendy, too, plans to move in a new direction. “But, whatever it may be,” she says, “I will have a passion for it that compares to the passion my husband has for water gardening.”
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