Untypical range

The beginning was a tree nursery in Ennsdorf, Lower Austria, in 1972, and just six years later came the opening of the first self-service Bellaflora garden centre in Linz. The next garden centre followed in 1986, for the first time an entirely newly developed location in Wels. Today the stores are positioned around Vienna and along the A1 motorway to Linz or the A2 to Klagenfurt. One store in Innsbruck and one in Germany (at Rosenheim) are the geographical exceptions.
“Our customers still today see us as a green specialist store, not as a discounter,” in the words of Nikolaus Thaller, managing director of the company. He prefers to regard the garden centres as atypical, for they offer neither garden furniture nor motorised garden equipment – merely hand tools. Every store has between 20 and 30 employees.
Mr Thaller is proud of the very high proportion of trainees, for whom Bellaflora has created the qualification of garden centre sales assistant, where previously the only skilled trade with a recognised training course was that of gardener. About two thirds of the group’s employees are appropriately qualified.
Buying is mainly done from regional nursery gardens. The short distances guarantee freshness. Only accessories and decorative lines are bought internationally. The main emphasis of the range has traditionally been on live green plants, with 65 per cent of sales generated from live plants for indoors and outdoors such as tree nursery products, summer and balcony plants, flower and vegetable seeds as well as Christmas trees. The garden sundries range consists of peat, potting composts, fertilisers, garden tools and clay or ceramic pots. Emphasis in the décor department offer is on artificial plants and silk flowers, handicraft supplies, glassware and candles.
The pet department rounds off the range. Under the slogan, “Pet food, not sweets”, pet food was positioned in the checkout area of a pilot store in the year 2001. The start saw four pallets stacked with 70 per cent cat food and 30 per cent dog food. In the words of Mr Thaller, “The new concept caught on with our customers immediately. Since then we have included a pet department in every new store.” There have been seven of them up to the present: Vienna-Donaustadt, Vösendorf-SCS, Oberwart, Vienna-Schwechat, Bruck-Oberaich, Villach and Linz-Leonding. Existing stores are also given a pet department when they are renovated. Such departments are uniform in size at about 160 m2. Live animals do not…