Gardener’s Supply Files for Bankruptcy as Its Sale Is Pending

Seeds for sale at Gardener’s Supply Credit: Bear Cieri

Updated at 11:33 a.m. on June 24, 2025.

Burlington-based Gardener’s Supply, an idealistic Burlington startup that grew over 39 years to a multimillion-dollar company with hundreds of employees in three states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Thursday. But the company plans to continue operating, and its potential sale to a competitor is pending.

Gardener’s Supply funded its off-season operations through a line of credit with Bank of America, according to the bankruptcy filing. In October 2024, the bank put a lien on the Gardener’s Supply headquarters in Burlington and pulled the company’s access to the credit line. The company has $8.2 million in secured debt, including the Bank of America lien and equipment loans, and a mortgage with Northfield Savings Bank.

In the filing, the company blames the retail environment, a problematic fulfillment software rollout and ongoing stock option obligations to employees.

The company’s board of directors authorized CEO Rebecca Gray to hire Aurora Management Partners and file for bankruptcy in mid-May. Gray, company lawyers and a chief restructuring officer with Aurora did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for interviews.

Gardener’s holds just $4 million in cash and owes more than that to at least 30 unsecured creditors, with UPS, Google and Meta in the top five. Four local companies are owed $262,000.

The company has 126 full-time and 281 part-time employees at wholesale, online and retail operations in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Gardener’s is seeking to sell its assets, which includes its headquarters in Burlington, to a competitor, Gardens Alive! The purchase price, in a tentative “stalking horse” agreement, is $9 million, according to the court filing. In the meantime, the debt restructuring plan submitted to the bankruptcy court in Delaware explains how the company intends to continue operations, preserve its value and make payroll until it can be sold.

Headquartered in Lawrenceburg, Ind., Gardens Alive! has acquired at least nine local seed, bulb and plant companies since owner Niles Kinerk launched his organic pest control and fertilizer catalog in 1984, according to the company website and trade industry reports.

Gardener’s Supply was started just a year earlier in Burlington by a group of idealistic community garden activists led by organic food visionary Will Raap, who transformed the garbage-strewn Intervale area of Burlington into a local center for growing organic food.

Kathleen LaLiberte, an avid gardener herself and one of the founding employees of Gardener’s Supply, recalled when Raap began importing gardening tools and supplies from Europe.

“I was so excited. I wrote a letter to Will and asked for an interview,” LaLiberte said. At the end of their conversation, he handed her a box of customer service letters. “That’s how I got started.”

For the next 27 years, LaLiberte worked closely with Raap and became creative director. She had wide latitude to focus on a shared vision centered on the needs of gardeners. The company grew from a do-gooder business with $500,000 in annual revenue in 1984 to $70 million in 2010, she recalled.

Even as Raap and his cadre of believers built the company, they invested their time and energy in the community and the environment. Gardener’s Supply offered community gardening grants, said Maree Gaetani, a public relations specialist who worked for Gardener’s. Raap and his team lobbied for protecting pollinators from pesticides, and he opposed genetically modified seeds.

“Will was always about everybody else,” Gaetani said. “That’s what made Gardener’s Supply special.”

Raap left in 2009 to pursue other ecological and organic agriculture ventures in Vermont and Costa Rica; he died in December 2022. Following his departure, the company shifted direction and became more focused on business growth, LaLiberte said.

The company continued to expand its offerings beyond gardening goods and became a certified benefit corporation, but struggled with the transition from catalog sales to online retail. Consolidation and shrinkage followed. Many hard goods were sourced from China. Raap could have outsourced the call center to save money, but chose to keep it in-house because he was loyal to his employees, according to former board member Nancy Small.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, with people stuck at home and worried about inflated food prices, gardening boomed, and Gardener’s was riding high with overall revenue of roughly $100 million, former employees said.

But once the gardening craze ended a few years later, sales tanked, according to legal filings. There were layoffs in several departments, former employees said. Today, the company’s annual revenue is on par with 2010, at $71.5 million.

Gardener’s Supply was one of the first employee-owned companies in Vermont. Cindy Turcot, a longtime CEO who has retired, was a founding board member of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, which advocates for structured ownership transfers to workers.

Lindsay Kurrle, the secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said the state “stands by ready to help if asked.”

There are 30 privately held employee-owned companies in Vermont. The largest, PC Construction, has 1,000 employees, said Matthew Cropp, the executive director of the center.

“Gardener’s has been a champion in the employee-owned company world, mentoring other companies,” Cropp said. “Losing them is a sad moment.”

In economic downturns, employee-owned companies tend to be more resilient and less likely to go bankrupt, Cropp said, but in the “age of Amazon,” there are more threats to local brick-and-mortar stores.

Cropp said employee-owned companies such as Gardener’s offer an employee stock ownership plan that gives them a small ownership stake in the company year over year, “kind of like a bonus,” except they don’t have access to the money right away. The ESOP is managed by company trustees who are responsible for reporting to the U.S. Department of Labor under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

Gardener’s set aside a percentage value of the stock based on external valuations. It took six years for employees to be vested, and once they left, they had to wait five years to begin receiving payouts. Several workers said they worry the money is now lost as a result of the bankruptcy.

“Ownership comes with risks and rewards,” Cropp said. In contrast, he said the Vermont Information Processing company also recently sold – but at a profit – and issued large payouts to employees.

Many workers at Gardener’s saw the ESOP as a de facto retirement account, even though there was “an unspoken risk,” Small said. When several senior leaders left at the same time, the company was liable for potentially millions of dollars in payouts, she said.

“It would be tragic for employees to lose their jobs and retirement as a result of the restructuring,” Small said.

Diane Fuchs, who worked for Gardener’s for 17 years, said she was supposed to begin receiving stock payouts this year, but she said she’s not counting on anything now. “None of this was guaranteed,” she said.

In 2018, her stock was worth $43,648. At the height of the pandemic, it soared to $157,000, then dropped to $89,000 in 2023. Now, she says, her balance is zero.

“I’m not bitter,” Fuchs said. “I wish Gardener’s Supply could continue.”