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About Hello
Hello |
In 1995 Chris Lucas and Bill Peeters
paired up to create a small one acre plant nursery on an
old junky site in Emerald Victoria. They named their
nursery Wandin Gully Tree Farm. Wandin Gully Tree Farm
employed locals and stocked a small range of roses,
shrubs and trees. Chris had been involved in
horticulture for most of his life and previous to Wandin
Gully Tree Farm had successfully run a farm tree mail
order business and a tissue culture business which he
further developed in the United States, Chris employed
Bill
in his farm tree business as his buyer.
Chris had written and published a book on Paulownias &
Tagasaste and together with his wife Marie wrote and
published an annual newspaper called The Farm Tree News
which went out to around 100,000 farmers and they sold
up to half and million trees per year. . Chris has an
incredible passion for plants and has a real love for
showcasing and marketing plants. Chris completed many
fun and interesting photo and marketing projects for
plants such as Gunnera mannicata ‘The Giant Amazon
Perennial’ and Paulownia kawakami ‘The Sapphire Dragon
Tree’.
Chris and Bill were unknown in the retail plant
marketplace and employed the services of Maurie Fields
to voice their radio commercials. A year or two after
opening they changed their name to ‘Wombat Gully Plant
Farm’ and Chris used catch phrases such as ‘Check out
the wombats out the front mate’, ‘Get bare rooted’ and
‘Hook on the trailer, bolt on the roof racks’ in their
advertising.
In 1997 the business had a huge backlog of stock and was
struggling. Chris and Marie were invited to a business
seminar hosted by ARN in Hong Kong and from this seminar
Chris developed ‘Hello Hello’ and three rules which he
used in all his radio and television advertising, which
are to 1. Concentrate your firepower 2. Ground your
offer in reality 3. Have a clear & consistent message.
By using these ideas this put the business on the map!
In 2000 Chris & Bill decided to go their separate ways.
Bill continued to own and operate Wombat Gully Plant
Farm in Hoppers Crossing & Geelong and Chris continued
to operate Wombat Gully Plant Farm in Emerald. To
differentiate the businesses Chris developed the trading
name ‘Chris & Maries Plant Farms’ seeing the
introduction of Marie in the television and radio ads.
Marie had studied dance and singing for many years and
brought a fresh lively approach to the ads.
Bill sold his nurseries and moved up north with his wife
Wendy.
Over the last few years Chris together with his team
have worked really hard and now own and operate five
retail stores Carrum Downs,
Campbellfield,
Traralgon,
Echuca
&
Bendigo and have developed some of the most
popular plant promotions which have become household
names such as Neighbours-Be-Gone® Trees,
Silver
Stirling™ Pittosporum &
Aussie
Outdoor Palms, to name just a few.

The vision for Hello Hello is to build a national chain
of family owned plant nurseries which could compete very
successfully with the big chain stores, which have
essentially been taking over the nursery business in
Australia. In the last few years we have brought out
our own range of potting & planting mixes and
fertilisers called Devotion, commenced importing
hardware products from china and built up our buying
power, our own plant production resources and built a
substantial fleet for trucking plants. We intend to
create the first nursery chain stores in Australia that
can genuinely complete on price across a broad range of
products against the big chain stores whilst providing
good service and gardening advice. |
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Please
be advised that availability & prices may change without notice.
Hours 9:00 AM -5:00 PM Monday to Sunday |
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