Rood Landscape Closes its Garden Center

TEQUESTA, Fla. — Rood Landscape announced the Garden Center store located on County Line Road in Tequesta would be closing the doors to the retail buyer. The closing is part of a broad strategy to refocus the direction of the state’s 10th-largest full service landscape service provider, company officials said.

Company employees were notified that the store would be closing after an inventory reduction sale. They will be offered jobs elsewhere within the company, said Bert Clattenburg, the company’s chief executive officer.
"This is just part of our back-to-the-basics strategy," Clattenburg said. "We determined we could provide our customers with better landscape services by becoming more focused on what we do best."

The Garden Center was a key part of the company's growth when there was not a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, Wal-Mart and Kmart in the area.  The Garden Center provided a place for local gardeners to purchase plants and specialty gardening items. In recent years the big box stores cut prices to lure gardeners on price and the independent garden centers were not able to compete. 

Ron Vekeman, Garden Center manager, has been continuing to bring in more and more unique items to the garden center.  "The store is a wonderful concept," he said, offering a unique garden items and a relationship with the customer. "Every customer knew the person behind the counter on a first-name basis," Vekeman said. “However, the amount of inventory that we needed to carry and the availability of highly qualified garden center staffing has made the Garden Center a challenge.”

The closure comes as Rood has increased the amount of landscape and maintenance sales, and the Garden Center staff will be transferred into other departments to offer customers more communication and personal service. "Closing our Garden Center store results from our decision to redeploy our resources to our other departments which have increased sales over the past two years," Clattenburg said in a statement issued by the company. "This restructuring program is an important step in our plan to improve future performance and enhance our 'employee owners' value."