English gardens inspire massive retail nursery in Ohio - Petitti's Garden Center - Brief Article

Petitti's Garden Center overwhelms shoppers with size and color

On seven acres in Strongville, Ohio, 20 minutes outside Cleveland, sits a glass-and-brick monument to garden retailing which is testing the limits of size, assortment and pricing that customers will accept from a specialty dealer.

Petitti's Garden Center here is definitely something different: a 128,000-square-foot store with 57,000 square feet under glass and a 40-foot-wide, 42-foot-high, 205-foot-long atrium where 28-foot-high trees are displayed. One area inside the store is adorned by more than 1,000 hanging baskets of flowers. Outside, the store would be hard to miss, with its 450-slot parking lot that is split by a striking retention pond and fountain, surrounded by topiary.

This garden center, which opened in April, has an international pedigree. The Petitti family wanted their store to reflect aspects of English gardens that they had visited on regular trips to Great Britain over the previous five years. The family retained Malcolm Scott Consultants, a U.K.-based architectural firm, as designer of the garden center, which was built, at a cost of $6 million, by a Virginia-based subsidiary of Prince Enterprises, a Holland-based construction firm.

Colorful, Italian-made lawn furniture -- including a $2,599 sheet metal chair carved into the shape of a butterfly -- is positioned alongside canopied displays for stylish house-wares and pottery. The store does include conventional lawn care products like pesticides and herbicides, but it does nor sell outdoor power equipment and stocks very little in the way of hand tools or irrigation systems.

Anyway, hardlines merely support this store's main feature: its broad array of plants and flowers that is distinctively laid out across the breadth of its selling space.

Petitti's has served this market since 1969. It started growing its own plants in 1992 and expanded into growing vegetable plants two years later through its acquisition of Casaverde Gardens. Its seven garden centers are now 98 percent self sufficient, including its facility in Cleveland that is almost as large as the Strongville center.

The nursery in Strongville is accented by "display gardens" with trellises, statuary, pottery and, sometimes, water systems. A shading system slides along the slanted roof to naturally cool the covered selling space. Below, electric heating coils have been built into the concrete floor of the glassed-in display area for live goods. Checkout counters inside the store are placed under large green umbrellas that match the color of the banner signage, suspended dramatically from the ceiling, which identifies certain departments. The atrium includes a 130-seat dining area known as "Cafe Angelo."

"The community has come in and they are awed by the place." said Angelo Petitti Jr., the company's general manager and son of the owner, Angelo Sr. "And the display gardens really help boost sales." Petitti added that the amount of volume that is sold through this facility had extended his company's growing season "by two or three plantings," and that the sheer size of the store has actually contributed to increasing turnover. "The store brings customers to a whole new spending level," he said, pointing to one display that had 50 plants within it. "We will sell all of this."

Petitti admitted, however, that the store has some bugs to be worked out. For example, the garden center opened with 115 employees, 45 of whom were laid off in June because "we're still trying to figure out how to anticipate demand" in a store this large, he explained. At its checkout counters, little electric fans have been placed behind computerized registers to keep them from overhearing.

Petitti's biggest challenge, though, will be to figure out what price image it wants this store to project. On the day in early July when NHCN visited this store as part of a tour of local nurseries conducted by the American Nurserymen and Landscapers Association, Petitti's was selling what seemed to be an unusually high amount of live inventory at significant discounts of up to 50 percent.

Petitti admitted that his store's pricing strategy was still in transition, though to that point the family had resisted lowering its prices to match local competition, which includes "five or six big garden centers within five to 10 miles" of the store, he said. (Lake County, Ohio, continues to be one of the country's biggest producing regions, with 200 nurseries and 5,000 acres used for production.) At least one nursery retailer on the tour thought that this degree of discounting sent a mixed message" to customers, especiall with so much high-end furniture on display and with the stores layout encouraging the perception of a pricier environment.

Another nursery retailer observed that it might be harder for a store this size to find enough new products to replace those that "trend out" after a few years, which he suggested happens frequently in this retailing sector.