Top quality garden centre in Holland

The garden centre in Zwolle was an advertisement for the Dutch Intratuin Group, which operates over 50 garden centres in Holland and Belgium and is renowned in the sector for the quality of its presentation and a range oriented uncompromisingly towards plants. On 14 October 2004, however, Girbe Drenth left the Intratuin Group. His objective in taking this step was to achieve an independence that he no longer considered to be guaranteed as a member of Intratuin: “Over the last few years we have developed at different rates to one another“, Drenth says, “and now I would like to put my own ideas and concepts into practice“. Prior to his departure, Drenth’s three garden centres in Assen, Groningen and Zwolle contributed around eight per cent to the overall sales of the Intratuin Group. The annual fees due to the central organisation always came to close on a million.
The Tuinland garden centre in Zwolle was constructed on top of the car park.
The new grouping is trading under the name Tuinland. The dynamic entrepreneur is already planning a further garden centre that he aims to open at the end of 2005 in Groningen. This second outlet in the city, on a retail area of 12,000 m², is being designed and built by the Dutch greenhouse company Thermoflor.
Girbe Drenth is an enthusiastic and successful garden centre operator.
Drenth’s first move after leaving Intratuin was to cut the range of goods from 150,000 prescribed products to just 15,000. He is also dispensing with Intratuin’s own-brand pumps, compost varieties and fertilizers, although he does not intend to produce any private label products of his own. Another important objective for him is to increase the number of male customers in his garden centres, where 70 per cent of the clientele is made up of women, and to this end small motor-driven appliances and tools for the garden are to be given greater prominence. The range currently comprises 50 per cent plants and 50 per cent accessories, home furnishings, appliances, clothing and pets.
The garden pond section is in the cold glasshouse and thereby physically separate from the pet department.
The pet department, covering nearly 400 m², sells food for dogs, cats, small animals and birds as well as an extensive range of accessories. Drenth believes that pet food is no longer a money-spinner, in contrast to the accessory segment, which makes a substantial contribution to sales in this department. Small animals and birds feature in the department, but the entrepreneur…