Sander de Dijcker (Tuincentrum Osdorp) about the online growth of the past year

Tuincentrum (garden centre) Osdorp, close to the centre of Amsterdam, is reaching its physical capacity. “We do not own the land next door at the moment. This means that we have two options, do we build up higher or do we grow further in the online field?", says Sander de Dijcker, who has been working at Osdorp since 2016. Before that, he worked at Garden Connect: “It was time to get to know the business from the other side”.  This interview is part of our new whitepaper, you can download the whole whitepaper to read more.

 

Family-owned business

The garden centre has traditionally been a family business and still has that friendly atmosphere. “Osdorp takes very good care of its employees. That's very nice. There is also a different style of communication because everyone knows each other so well. This makes it easier for you to understand the other person", says Sander, speaking from his car at a quarter to eight in the morning.

PIM

Osdorp does not wait until new developments are proposed. The company is always very actively looking for improvements. "We have always wanted to lead the way, and that is also the approach of our current director Ruud Ottenhof.”

Osdorp has, for example, developed its own PIM (Product Information Management) system. “We noticed that it was more convenient for many purposes to have all your product information in one place. From there, you can easily provide all the information to other channels and you know that the information is always up to date. This makes things a lot more efficient and you are less dependent on other systems. That is why we started using the PIM system. We can also link it to external data sources so that you can add a lot of product information very quickly.”

 

Growth

Osdorp Garden Centre has been growing steadily in the online field, and they have hired an extra employee who will fully focus on this. “The current employees could not combine this with their activities in the physical store. In fact, they were constantly needing to solve problems. We noticed an immediate difference, now that we have a better range of products online.” This year, Osdorp wants to take major steps forward. “At the moment, we are working together with Garden Connect to implement a new look and feel for the website. The old design was simply no longer attractive and there are a number of new techniques that could be added.

Customer loyalty card

In the coming season, the focus will be on integrating the customer loyalty programme. "We have a lot of information, but we are not doing much with it yet.” Integrating the card more closely into our system is a difficult process, but we have already taken a number of steps. We want to provide more targeted information to the customers. When they pay for something, this can immediately be seen in their online account. With that information, we can offer even more targeted information to the customer. If the customer has a balcony, they will be particularly interested in products related to that. We want to develop this much further.”