Urban Outfitters Opens Garden Center In Philadelphia

Urban Outfitters new fourth brand, Terrain debuted last week near Philadelphia. UO has a pretty solid foundation to start the new brand on. The company purchased popular local garden center J. Franklin Styer Nurseries and will retain staff from that business. In fact the transition will carry through to the name as the store will officially be known as ‘Terrain at Styer’s.

This new venture expands UO’s reach from traditional retailer into the service sector. Terrain will offer garden design consultation services and building services. Within the store there is a cafe that offers a menu of fresh locally sourced food that will change with the seasons.

Ohjoy.com took a tour just after the opening and have posted a full gallery of photos on flickr. It’s quite obvious that UO leveraged it’s strength of visual merchandising in displaying the plants and product. Even the shopping bags and Terrain collateral are beautifully executed.

While it may seem that the mainstream promotion of eco-consciousness is the motivation behind UO creation of Terrain, it’s actually a different shade of green. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that nationally, Americans spend $34 billion on plants, flowers, mowers and garden equipment, according to Bruce Butterfield, organization research director for the National Gardening Association, a nonprofit group for home gardeners. The landscape design, construction and maintenance market is $45 billion, he said. The garden center retail landscape is fairly polarized between local mom and pop nursery’s on one end and big box retailers like Home Depot on the other. UO looks to position terrain somewhere in between and hopes to become for gardening centers what West Elm and CB2 have done to furniture shopping.