The Clover Lawn Society

While Montana and I were out planting seeds in the garden yesterday, we got a little slap happy at one point and started joking about clover. Montana LOVES clover and (not so) secretly deposits it all over the property. Steve thinks it’s a weed and continually tries to eradicate it. Here are some of the benefits of having clover in your lawn:

Clover lawns are a highly sustainable, eco-friendly alternative or addition to traditional turf grass. They require significantly less water, eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers, and attract vital pollinators. Compared to grass, clover stays greener longer, rarely yellows from pet urine, and requires much less mowing.

I like it because most of our “grassy” areas are just weeds anyway, and the clover stays greener and is bee-friendly. Clover is kind of a “If You Know You Know” kind of thing, and it’s super polarizing, which makes me laugh a bit.

Anyway, while we were joking around with some of the tag lines we would attribute to clover lawns, it occurred to me that this would make a wonderful test of a print-on-demand drop-ship e-commerce endeavor. Yes, I did just use all of those fancy terms. “Print on demand” means products that you do not hold inventory for - when someone orders it, you print it. My favorite wallpaper and home furnishings company is an online business that does just that. Also I have a wrapping paper company that I love, same thing. “Drop ship” means it ships directly from the point of manufacture. So now transporting it to a middle man (me) who then transports it to an end customer. The manufacturer ships it directly. And “e-commerce” just means selling things online.

So since it was rainy today, and I didn’t really feel like doing any REAL work (and my new jigsaw puzzle is going to be VERY hard!), I decided to create a business to sell clover-slogan merchandise today. Of course, ChatGPT was with me every step of the way (no surprise there.) We refined/came up with 7 slogans and created designs for them. We named the endeavor The Clover Lawn Society because it made me crack up, so serious, so official, so doesn’t exist. Of course it needed a logo.

Montana suggested a website called TeePublic.com, which turned out to be a great choice. It was super easy to set up our store and start to populate it. Our store’s URL is https://www.teepublic.com/user/clover-lawn-society.

I only got 3 of our 7 designs uploaded, because as it turns out it takes quite a bit of prodding to get ChatGPT to produce high enough resolution images with correctly transparent/white combination backgrounds that I ran out of juice. But I’ll get the rest uploaded tomorrow, and then I will “test” what it is like to buy them.

This useless semi-hilarious little endeavor took me only a few hours, and it actually was quite fun and pretty educational. I’m going to have some little square business cards made up with a QR code to our store link, and maybe I will start depositing them in various garden centers. My only goal is to have ONE person order ONE thing with ONE of our designs on it. That would be amazing! But it might take some modern algorithm-based advertising to pull that off, so that will be the next phase of The Great Experiment!