Wholesale suppliers to the Green Industry are the focus of a newly formed organization.
The Pennsylvania Landscape & Nursery Association (PLNA) has launched the American Green Industry Association (AGIA), a national association that will operate exclusively online.
“PLNA and other state and national associations have done a good job of representing the industry as a whole,” said Jim MacKenzie, chairman of PLNA’s board of directors and president of Octoraro Native Plant Nursery. “But we saw a need for an organization that exclusively represents the perspective of the industry’s wholesale suppliers, just as we have associations that focus on landscape contractors and retail garden centers.”
The association offers two online directories: the Wholesale Landscaper’s Buyer’s Guide that is geared to landscape contractors and the Wholesale Garden Center’s Buyer’s Guide that caters to retail garden centers.
“Our business model is exclusively online,” MacKenzie said. “We want to use the Internet and technology to provide services to the wholesale suppliers in our industry. These directories are the first step in that direction.”
MacKenzie sees the new association–whose members include wholesale nurseries, hardscape manufacturers, irrigation suppliers, equipment manufacturers and other wholesale suppliers–as complementary to other state and national associations.
“We believe strongly in the role that associations play in the green industry,” he said. “It is our hope that AGIA will become an essential piece of the green industry association fabric that is our national, state and regional green industry colleagues.”
