Echter's Garden Center Reshapes Business To Meet Customer Needs During Pandemic

ARVADA, Colo. (CBS4)- Many Colorado businesses are preparing to reopen this week, while others are planning to expand their customer base. Echter's Nursery and Garden Center in Arvada is considered an essential business, but out of safety precautions for staff and customers, had closed their in-store shopping amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

"We began coming up with new procedures, cleaning, social distancing and all that kind of stuff," explained Julie Echter, the store manager. "As it progressed we kind of realized that we're going to have to go further than that."

Echter's has been serving the Arvada community for more than 60 years. When the pandemic hit, they decided to find a new way to do business and created an online shop for curbside pickup.

"We're rolling with it and figuring it out each day at a time," Echter said. "Each day we learn something that works and something that didn't work well, and change it the next day."

The online shop allows customers to place an order for gardening supplies or plants, to pick up within 72 hours. Right now, they have 900 orders pending.

"We spent lots of hours taking pictures and uploading stuff to the website," Echter said. "We kind of scrapped everyone's job titles and everyone has come together as a team to pull it off."

While they are still perfecting the online ordering and curbside pickup, the team is now looking to what's next. They're creating safety procedures so they can reopen the garden center to walk-in customers.

"We'll be limiting the number of people so will have to set up the outside areas so that we can count people going in and out," she explained. "We'll have to redo sanitizing procedures so that we can keep everything safe and clean for everyone."

Echter said they'll continue to add to the online store for customers who do not want to shop in-store, and would prefer curbside pickup for health reasons. The team is looking forward to focusing in on customer service once again.

"A big part of our business is customer service and education so it's kind of hard that we can't offer that to people like we usually do right now," she said. "We're doing the best we can."

A decades old, family business, adapting to the times to ensure they're still there for their loyal customers.

"We're very lucky and lucky to have customers that have supported us through this and a great community," she said.

LINK: Echter's Nursey and Garden Center