Praxis in green

Do DIY stores have garden expertise too? Peter Stox is an experienced garden centre operator and he is sure that the Dutch DIY store chain Praxis is doing it right. He has been in the business for 25 years and took over the garden centre in Heerlen in 2007. For many years he was a member of the market-leading Dutch cooperative Intratuin. He left this in January 2015 to become affiliated with his two other stores in Roermond and Venlo to the Praxis outlets.
The Praxis chain now not only operates 141 DIY stores (eleven of which also feature a garden centre), but also three standalone garden centres. On the store logo the name and type of font are the same, but the colours are different, with the brand name in white (rather than red) against a green (instead of yellow) background.
The garden centre's past affiliation to Intratuin is otherwise still viewed in a positive rather than detrimental light. It demonstrates that a garden centre that is managed along the lines of a large-format DIY store and with its know-how and purchasing volumes in particular can present a very attractive image.
The path customers take through the store to the left, thus clockwise, is not very typical of garden centres. The strict routing of shoppers, on the other hand, taking them from the cold hall through the pet department with aquariums and small animals to the warm hall and the check-out, and only interrupted by the café, is a feature that is highly typical of the Netherlands.

An overall retail area of 6 000 m² is available. The cold and warm halls are each allocated 2 500 m², while the remaining 1 000 m² is outside. A central location in the middle of the customer route is occupied by the café - an essential feature of garden centres of this size in the Netherlands - which can seat 135 people.
The view of the operators that their garden centre range is more at home against the large backdrop of (green) living rather than just in a green store is made clear not only by the range composition and the sales floor ambience created by an abundance of warm wood. The location also makes a statement: the Praxis Tuincentrum is situated on Woonboulevard Heerlen, which claims to be the biggest home shopping boulevard in Europe with 50 specialist shops and…