How to turn your IGC into your customers' 'third place'

Flower Child Vintage (facebook.com/FlowerChildVintage; instagram.com/flowerchildcolumbus) features vintage, modern and mid-century items and whimsical visual merchandising. Items for sale include clothing, collectibles, furniture, lighting, barware, housewares, pottery, jewelry, magazines, vinyl albums, art and more. The two-story, nearly 30,000-square-foot upcycle retailer is located in a former warehouse. (There's also a second location in Cleveland, Ohio.) Owner Joe Valenti said he believes “the weirder, the better.” Valenti

is a big fan of happy accidents in retail and encourages retailers to look at possibilities or visit corners of their business they never go to and look at them in a different way. He also said his shop — which sells vintage from the 1930s and on — is a perfect first date location, with a focus on being a community gathering space. It has rooms within rooms and utilizes color blocking. Purchases are either wrapped up in paper or placed in brown bags with tissue paper; both are tied up with a bow. “We don’t sell the steak; we sell the sizzle here,” Valenti says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easton Town Center

Easton Town Center (eastontowncenter.com, facebook.com/EastonTownCenter, instagram.com/eastontownctr), which has four districts and sees more than 30 million visitors a year, features more than 200 retailers, plus dining, a movie theater, comedy club and pedestrian-friendly open-air town squares, fountains and parks. The stop at Easton Town Center included a scavenger hunt to discover different retail experiences, merchandising techniques, technology and connection to the community. Many stores use biophilic merchandising, through graphics, artificial plants or live plants. There are huge planters full of beautiful flowers and outdoor seating options everywhere. There’s a focus on shopping using your phone at Amazon Style, the second such location in the country (the first is in Los Angeles). The shopping center also features a variety of luxury brands. Think about how you can incorporate luxury into your IGC — and no, that doesn’t mean you need to start selling Gucci. What does luxury mean to your customers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

East Market (eastmarketcolumbus.com, facebook.com/EastmarketColumbus, instagram.com/eastmarket_cbus), one of the newest markets in Columbus, is in a former trolley building. It has several food stalls, offering everything from pizza and chicken to Middle Eastern and Greek cuisine. The market also features The Plant Gays (theplantgays.com, facebook.com/the.plant.gays, instagram.com/the.plant.gays), which started during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 as a hobby for the owner. The stall sells plants, concrete planters, home accessories and handmade wares. It also offers plant design, delivery, staging, installation, plant care guides, repotting service and watering service.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Local artist and self-taught printmaker Angela Stiftar, who goes by "Midwest Mermaid," led a tour of Chromedge Studios, the Vanderelli Room and 400 West Rich. The spaces are former warehouses turned artist studios and gallery space for Columbus’ diverse creative community, and the development helped spearhead the initial revitalization of Columbus' Franklinton neighborhood, which hosts "Franklinton Fridays" once a month in which the studios and galleries are open to the public. The tour of the art spaces was meant to inspire garden center staff to create a third space at their own IGCs by inviting in local artists to help create community. One idea is hosting an art exhibit that could help drive foot traffic to your IGC, especially during an opening reception.

 

 

 

 

Planthropy (planthropy.co; facebook.com/planthropy; instagram.com/planthropy) creates professional curated biophilic designs, including interior plantscapes (both real and artificial) and living walls. Six to seven years ago, owners Jessie Laux and Michael Creath were initially working in two separate businesses: Laux, along with working in social media marketing, had Planthropy and was hosting workshops, while Creath was working in landscape design, eventually moving into living walls and an artistic approach to nature. They decided to merge their endeavors, and now, the company has large scale installations in 25 states (a new wall in Colorado in the coming weeks will make it 26). Planthropy hires local staff to maintain the living walls. "We are plant people and artists at our core," Laux said. "We love pushing the designs of things in a very artistic way...The sky is kind of the limit when it comes to interior plantscape design." The business, which officially started in 2015, just moved into its new space in Franklinton a few weeks ago. They attribute much of their business to successful search engine optimization tactics, with Laux's background in social media marketing; Planthropy ranks on high search results for things like living walls, moss walls or green walls. Creath added that they make good communication with their customers (and potential customers) a priority. Laux also said she's had a change of heart when it comes to using faux plants, which she previously called "the F-word." "When we started doing that, it was a little like twist of a knife in the heart because I never thought that we would be working with fake plants," Laux says. "But we have a really great supplier who has very realistic plants who has really changed my vision of it. And as we have gotten different requests from clients, ourselves and the team have really learned to work with the plants and manipulate them in very artistic ways to make them look like they are living and real, and we prune them and trim them and mix them with other things. So there's still a lot of kind of artistic ways to work with them. So we actually do work with faux quite a bit now. And it is pretty sought after, because sometimes clients do not want any maintenance, or there's just a high traffic area where maybe living plants aren't the solution."