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CentralightSpring14b

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26 centralight spring '14 Katie Flickinger grew up in the busy Detroit suburbs, but she dreamed of having a life on the farm. "I used to ask for chickens for Christmas," says Flickinger, '09, adding that she got her love for growing things from her grandparents and from her father, "who was big into tomatoes." Flickinger started Garden Hoard in 2010. Working from a small sunroom in her Livonia home and half a dozen garden plots in metro Detroit, Flickinger propagates 1,000 heirloom tomato plants a year and sells seeds from them, primarily online. The rest of her revenue – up to 60 percent of her business – comes from selling produce at farmers markets during the summer with her husband, Christian. Heirloom tomatoes are varieties that have been in existence for more than 50 years. Flickinger says there are more than 10,000 varieties of heirloom tomatoes that come in a variety of colors, including yellow, purple and black. Wintertime finds her cleaning fruit, vegetable and flower seeds and packaging them for sale for the spring planting season. She even makes the seed packages by hand. "It's a nonstop process," Flickinger says. Her business bloomed last year after she entered a business plan competition sponsored by the Michigan Women's Foundation in Detroit and won the top $10,000 prize in the lifestyle business category. "People are more interested now in locally grown food. I thought Katie hit a nerve with her business plan. She's visionary," says Maria Thompson, entrepreneur-in- residence at Arsenal Venture Partners. "She got you so excited, you almost wanted to start gardening," says Thompson, a non-gardener. Flickinger says she calls on the lessons she learned in her CMU retailing classes to help her think through business problems. "I learned in my retail classes that you need to take time to plan," Flickinger says. "If you don't do market research, you're going to fail." Garden Hoard's sales rose 250 percent last year. She also gives away older seeds to online customers. Urban Farmer the

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