We provide quality cuttings to build your fig orchard

I didn’t taste my first fresh fig until about 2009. Later, I caught the fig bug and in 2013, my wife, Mary, and I started growing figs in the Talladega National Forest of east central Alabama (zone 7b). We also started to do fig videos. See About Lance – How I Caught The Fig Bug.

Creating an online store for fig lovers who have caught the fig bug wasn’t something we initially set out to do. But one thing led to another, and to another, and before we knew it, voilà! – a fig store.

Why 4Fig❤️Lovers.com?

For years, I didn’t sell any cuttings from my fig orchard. I mostly just gave them away or traded them. But my fig trees were getting bigger, more established and, over time, I received numerous requests to provide cuttings. Going back and forth in email or messaging was very time consuming, very inefficient, and just a hassle. I even tried online sales platforms.

Fast forward 2-1/2 years. I had almost 300 fig varieties. My fig orchard had become quite a lot to manage and care for. In addition, the same is true for my listings. It had become more and more apparent that I needed to create my own online store. Why? It was not a purely financial decision. Though the seller fees were certainly a consideration, I was more than willing to pay the fees if my time could be saved. It really boiled down to two things:

1. Time: When I only had a few varieties listed, time was not much of a consideration. It was a simple matter. But as I had dozens of listings, and MANY more on the way, managing listings had become much more of a challenge. The amount of time required to properly manage listings had been taking away from the time needed to properly care for my orchard, take and ship cuttings, etc. An online store, designed from the ground up to properly manage listings, inventory control, facilitate shipping & customer communication, and more, just became a no-brainer.
2. Flexibility to serve customers better: There is a lot of development that goes into building an online sales platform, but most sites just simply cannot provide all of the functionality that all sellers need.
   1. Automated and fully integrated shipping notifications. No more manual copying and pasting of tracking info.
   2. The freedom to communicate with customers however would best serve them. Sometimes a simple phone call can accomplish in a few minutes, what may take days via messaging.
   3. Notifications and general communication. I receive numerous questions about whether I have a particular variety available. The ability to notify customers when I have a variety in stock could save customers a lot of time and hassle.
   4. Providing much more general information to customers than is practical within a single generic listing.

The list could go on, but I’m sure you get the point. Flexibility became critical.

There was one additional consideration: branding. Marketing has never been my forte. The same is true for my business acumen. I much prefer growing, eating, and sharing figs. And it was just a hobby. A hobby that I just loved. Selling cuttings and trees was merely a way for me to finance the growth of my hobby and efficiently share cuttings. But when I filed my 2020 taxes, I found that my hobby had unexpectedly turned into a business. And that turned out to be a good thing, as the amount of time that I was putting into the whole process really required an income.

But figs have become so popular over the years, that it is easy for a seller to get lost among all of the other sellers. There are many that are selling less than optimal cuttings (skinny, short, dried out). Cuttings had become somewhat commoditized. That is, many “newbies” would just look for the cheapest prices, with no consideration of quality. So I needed to build a brand to differentiate the quality that we provide. Hence, 4Fig❤️Lovers.com.

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