Al's Garden & Home opens new location

Oregon-based grower-retailer Al’s Garden & Home, No. 16 on Garden Center magazine’s 2016 Top 100 list, has opened a new store, the fourth location for the family-owned independent garden center.

Mark Bigej, COO of Al’s Garden & Home and third generation owner along with his two sisters, Darcy Ruef and Dorothy Russo, and his father, Jack, says the family always keeps their eyes open for new opportunities to grow, but this new store in Wilsonville, Ore., just “fell into our lap.”

“There was a garden center there, and the current owners [of Wilsonville Garden Center] were retiring,” Bigej says. A construction company purchased the building and reached out to Al’s in mid-October, asking if they’d be interested in the property, a 3.5-acre site just off I-5, a main highway.

“We really like the city that it’s in, it’s a great community. We started negotiating with the owner and we came to something that we thought was feasible that we could do, so we said, ‘Hey, let’s go for it,’” Bigej says. “It has a well-structured building and sales yard.”

Before the grand opening at the end of March this year, Al’s renovated the building and nursery yard, and installed signs with Al’s new branding and name – Al’s Garden & Home.

“We are changing are name. We just feel that ‘garden center’ is a little bit of an old term, so we are trying to get with the times,” he says. “That was the first store where all of the signage is Al’s Garden & Home.”

The other three stores in Sherwood, Gresham, and the first and flagship store in Woodburn, Ore., will be updated gradually over time.

Sherwood was the third location, built in 2005, and is on 10.5 acres. The newest store is much smaller comparatively at 3.5 acres, and Al’s also leases the building, which is a first for the company. The store is halfway between the Sherwood and Woodburn locations in an established city that is still growing, and even continued building through the recession, Bigej says. In fact, there is a 500-house development being built right near the store, he says.

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"We’re seeing a positive upswing. The economy is strong, housing is strong, and that all helped in making this decision. Also, our growing facilities we didn’t feel were quite maxed out. Our business model is to be a grower-retailer. We felt like we could eke out just a little bit more from our growing operations, so we’re trying to maximize that," Bigej says. Al's has three growing locations in addition to its retail stores. "We may find out that we are putting them under a little stress, and that we would need to grow again, which we have the room for. But for us, it’s a constant balance between the production and what we can sell in stores. We felt this would help us utilize all of our growing operations."

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The largest, most complicated project at the Wilsonville store was building an 8-foot-tall, 300-foot-long wooden fence to line the loud, busy freeway outside of the nursery area. The fence is a sound barrier, making outdoor shopping a much more pleasant experience for customers, Bigej says. They are also working on landscaping the front of the fence to improve curb appeal from the highway and to serve as advertising for people driving by.

“We also made little updates to make it more functional and improved the look of the front of the store by adding a large arbor that is consistent with all of our stores now,” he says. “We added two automatic doors and an exit door. We put the cash registers in a totally different place … Our goal was that when people walked in, they would know it’s a different place and know it’s an Al’s. I think we achieved that.”

Al’s stores are just outside of the greater Portland, Ore., area, in the Willamette Valley, and the economy and housing market are both strong. Unfortunately, they have not had an ideal spring – it’s been mostly wet and cold, so they are waiting for the weather to improve and for the season to kick off.

They’ve hired eight full-time staff, including a manager from another store, and seasonal staff will join them once spring has finally sprung. But based on the reception the store has already received, Bigej is excited and optimistic.

“Our grand opening blew us away. We were really well received by the community. We had two ribbon cuttings, one for the general public, and had a great grand opening weekend,” he says. “We had a chamber of commerce ribbon cutting, and the business community came out, and we had 100 people from local businesses there. Customers and businesses around have been very, very supportive of it. We’ve been impressed.”

ALSO READ: The rewards of a gamble and growing your own: Jack and Mark Bigej, father-and-son CEO and COO of Al’s Garden Center in Oregon, talk about the biggest changes and challenges they’ve seen in the industry during the past two decades.

Image: The Bigej family poses for a photo during a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Wilsonville Al's Garden & Home store. Courtesy of Al's Garden & Home.