You never take the execution home
Four days on a coach with 250 people from more than twenty countries who are all in the same trade. That is the IGCA congress. The best part is not the stores you visit, but the conversation about them on the way back.
Two things from this edition stayed with us. At Scherdi you walk straight through the production greenhouse to reach the store. You see the plant standing where it grows, and that sells better than any sign. That same store carries a complete range of grave planting. Utterly normal for a German, a discovery for a French colleague in our group.
At Wohlhüter the pots in the outdoor area are sunk into the ground. You are not walking past stock, you are walking through a garden.
The idea travels, the execution does not
That difference is exactly what you go for. What is completely ordinary in one country has never been seen in another. But we rarely take anything home one to one. It almost never works that way.
That sunken pot is not a Bavarian idea. It is the insight that a customer would rather walk through a garden than across a storage yard. That works just as well elsewhere, only not with the same plants and not in the same way. The same goes for in-store communication, display and range: you see something, you understand why it works, and then you build it again at home.
A customer would rather walk through a garden than across a storage yard.
And all the while you are counting
We cannot help it. How wide the main aisle is. What stands in the first 100 m² past the entrance. How many square metres the catering takes: 600 in one, 300 in the other.
That last one is not trivia. In our benchmark those metres simply count as sales floor, so they have to return something. A 600 m² catering area in an 8,000 m² centre is 7.5 per cent of your floor. At a median of € 717 turnover per m² per year, that is the bar those metres are measured against, even when the return arrives elsewhere because people stay longer.
That arithmetic is the tool, not the journey. But without the tool, a store visit abroad is a pleasant outing; with it, it becomes a measure you can use back home.
Curious what your own floor says?
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