Rolfe Haggen has a hard time sitting still.  He manages and provides the labor for his herb seed store, Thyme Garden, so he likes to keep moving.   “If I sit long, I’m not doing work,” he says. 

Rolfe has proved this through the history of Thyme Garden.  “We had a restaurant for ten years before we started this business,” he recalls, “and we grew herbs at our restaurant, you know, to supply our kitchen, because we prepared everything with herbs.  So I started collecting seeds.” 

Rolfe decided to expand his local-grown herbs into a seed store.  Thyme Garden was such a success that he sold his restaurant in 1989 and put all of his energy into growing herbs and cultivating seeds.  

During the early 1990’s, Rolfe let a high school student develop an informational website for Thyme Garden.  The site provided some business, but not a substantial amount.  “You had to type in the products that you wanted and then email it to us,” Rolfe says.  “That put a limit, really, on the amount of products that people would order because they just got tired of typing.”

Rolfe and his wife Janet began looking for an online shopping cart, so when they got an invitation to a 90-minute StoresOnline presentation, they looked into it. After attending the all day Workshop, they purchased three websites, one for Thyme Garden and two more for a future joint venture. 

One of the best aspects of the StoresOnline program for Rolfe is that he doesn’t have to spend too much time sitting in his chair.  After letting the site programmers create his homepage, Rolfe entered the rest of the information himself.  “Once it’s set up, then it’s pretty much automatic,” he says.  “We have a paper catalog, that we send out to 8,000 people, and it was really easy for me to cut and paste all the information into the program.”

Today, Rolfe’s website is an important aspect of his business.  Along with handling the website, Rolfe provides all the labor necessary to grow the herbs and get their seeds.  Throw in guided tours, luncheons, and weekly weddings, and the revenues (and the hours of work) add up. 

Rolfe took the time to implement StoresOnline’s marketing strategies to rework the description and keyword information for several of his site’s pages.  As a result, Google regularly lists www.thymegarden.com  on the first page of search results for many of Rolfe’s main keywords.  This nearly doubled Rolfe’s traffic, drawing more than 200 visitors per day during the peak season.  

Rolfe doesn’t regret this addition to his business.  “I would recommend anybody who has any interest at all in doing a joint venture to just take that next step,” he says.  “You got to do some work, but it pays off.”

Visit Rolfe’s site at

http://www.thymegarden.com/

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