H. Hagedorn, 89; He Grew Rich on Miracle-Gro
Horace Hagedorn, the canny entrepreneur who developed a blue-green fertilizer he dubbed Miracle-Gro and marketed it to gardeners around the world, has died. He was 89.
Hagedorn, who also became a major philanthropist, died Monday at his home in Sands Point on New York’s Long Island of undisclosed causes.
In 1995, Hagedorn merged his Miracle-Gro company with the six-times-larger Scotts Co. -- a major lawn and garden product manufacturer based in Marysville, Ohio -- gaining three board seats and 42% of company stock. He became a vice president of Scotts’ board of directors and by 2001 had installed his son, James, as chief executive.
“Horace was a creative genius, and the success of this business, as well as the lawn and garden industry, is due to his energy, drive and insight,” James Hagedorn said after his father’s death.
With company management assured, the elder Hagedorn turned his attention to philanthropy. At the time of the merger, he and his wife Amy donated $45 million to the Long Island Community Foundation, which aids families and children’s programs.
The Hagedorn philanthropy has included medical research and treatment, libraries, scholarships, arts programs and social services. In 2002, Hagedorn guided Scotts to contribute $1 million for a new National Garden on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.
Neither a gardener nor a chemist, Hagedorn seemed an unlikely godfather to Miracle-Gro. A native New Yorker, he began his career in radio advertising during the Depression.
Hagedorn happened into his true calling in 1950 when an upstate New York gardener named Otto Stern asked him to design a newspaper advertisement for his mail-order plant business. Stern also sold a fertilizer to revive plants depleted by long shipping times.
Well aware that suburban gardens were a newfound postwar hobby, Hagedorn suggested that the two men develop their own fertilizer.
Stern and Hagedorn each invested $2,000 and asked a Rutgers University orchid expert to devise a soluble fertilizer for general garden use. Hagedorn said the natural moniker for the result- ing nitrogen-phosphorus-phosphate crystals should be Miracle-Gro.
Hagedorn daringly spent half of the start-up money -- $2,000 -- for a full-page ad in the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune. The ad generated $22,000 in sales in three days, and Hagedorn realized his two-pronged formula for building the company, which has never shown an annual loss: outsource and advertise.
Outsourcing provided a lean, mean profit-making machine, and advertising helped expand sales beyond New York state across the country, to the United Kingdom and beyond.
When Miracle-Gro joined Scotts in 1995, James Hagedorn told Forbes magazine in 1998, Miracle-Gro “consisted of 30 people in a $120-million business making $35 million a year and pretty much hiring everything out except the advertising and counting the money.”
Hagedorn left his own ad agency in 1965 to devote himself full time to the fertilizer company. Gradually, he bought out Stern and handed stock to the six children he had with his first wife, who died in 1984: James, Katherine, Paul, Robert, Susan and Peter.
With his marketing flair, Hagedorn wrote most of the advertising copy until his death and prided himself on the wording printed on the increasingly familiar yellow and green box: “All-Purpose Liquid Fertilizer for ‘Miracle Garden’ Results. All Flowers, All Vegetables, Roses, Tomatoes, Trees, Fruits, Shrubs, Lawns, Evergreens, House Plants.”
By the 1970s, Hagedorn was using television to establish Miracle-Gro as a nationally known brand. He put on a toupee and personally pitched the product from Death Valley, persuading viewers that if you could grow a garden there you could grow one anywhere, simply by applying Miracle-Gro.
When the ad failed -- sales actually dropped where the ad was broadcast -- he decided to simplify television spots and hire a professional pitchman. For many years, the spokesman was former television newsman John Cameron Swayze, and after 1985, actor James Whitmore.
Innately astute about making money -- as he later proved to be in giving it away -- Hagedorn in 2002 told the Washington Post about an early bit of advice he had received from Marvin Small, the Madison Avenue genius credited with inventing roll-on deodorant. Small said he could tell Hagedorn how to make a million dollars in five words: “Find a need, and fill it.”
“I said, ‘Marvin,’ ” Hagedorn recalled, “ ‘that’s six words,’ and he said, ‘So I lie a little.’ ”
Hagedorn is survived by his wife of 20 years, Amy; six children; four stepchildren; 22 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
