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First, Home Depot explored the potential of a partnership with TruGreen-ChemLawn, testing a marketing arrangement in nearly 30 stores in three cities earlier this year. After that deal fizzled, the might orange retailer assured investors that is was still interested in finding a way to tap into the professional landscape market.
Then came the August announcement that Home Depot was going to open three Home Depot Landscape Supply Stores in Atlanta, followed by news that LESCO agreed to sell some of its products through these outlets. Suddenly, there were more questions than answers about Home Depot’s plans.
Last week, on a dark, rainy morning, Lawn & Landscape toured one of the three new facilities as part of the American Nursery & Landscape Association’s landscape distribution tour. The tour featured approximately 100 nursery rewholesalers whose businesses focus on selling plants and other landscape supplies to landscape contractors, so this group eagerly anticipated this visit, to say the least.
While the tour attendees asked that their names not be used in the story, they had plenty of opinions about what they saw. Here’s a sampling of their comments:
- “It looks like a fancy garden center to me.”
- “I don’t see how they can have this sort of infrastructure while charging wholesale prices.”
- “I think they’ll get a fair number of consumers because they’ll think they’re getting a great deal on price.”
- “Their inventory isn’t deep enough to supply contractors, but the quality and size of the product is comparable to other distributors.”
- “Their best bet is the consumer and the small contractor who will like the one-stop shop and the convenience of the hours they offer (Mon.-Saturday, 7:30-7:30, and 11-6 on Sunday).”
As tour attendees scoured the 5.5-acre facility, most shared the same views expressed above. And many were particularly interested to see which growers were supplying Home Depot. “This creates issues for the rewholesalers who have been loyal to certain growers, and now those growers are selling through Home Depot,” noted a rewholesaler from Georgia. “Does this make plants a commodity?”
In addition to plants, landscape contractors can purchase a range of pesticides and irrigation products in these stores, including many well-known industry names. The list includes:
- BASF
- Bayer Environmental Science
- Cleary Chemical
- Dow AgroSciences
- LESCO
- Monsanto
- PBI Gordon
- Scotts
- Syngenta
- K-Rain
- NDS
- Orbit
- Rain Bird
- Toro Irrigation
- Pennington Seed
While the facility didn’t feature any mowers or hand-held power equipment, there were plenty of rental options, including Bluebird, Classen, Honda, Praxis, Vermeer and PowerHouse Equipment.
Home Depot personnel were fairly mum about the company’s plans for these stores, but they did share that the goal is a 50/50 residential/commercial mix. Now the question is how will the market respond.