Bellevue Botanical Garden

The Bellevue Botanical Garden was being expanded and a state-of-the-art visitor center added to the stunning outdoor site. Works Consulting collaborated with the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society, Kundig Design, and the City of Bellevue to design a customer-friendly store in the new visitor center.

Project Details

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Challenge

The Bellevue Botanical Garden was being expanded and a state-of-the-art visitor center added to the stunning outdoor site. The garden’s dedicated volunteer board envisioned a revitalized retail experience that reflected the natural beauty of the fifty-three-acre garden and earned significant revenue to support garden programs such as extensive educational and community events for children and adults.

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Solution

Works Consulting collaborated with the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society, Kundig Design, and the City of Bellevue to design a customer-friendly store in the new visitor center. We provided store and fixture layout services to work within Olsen Kundig’s design, revenue and budget projections, daily retail operations consulting, buying and new manager training. The Trillium store opened with a wide variety of garden and nature-themed gifts, home and garden décor, an array of books for gardeners, cooks, and lovers of the outdoors, educational gifts for children, local jewelry, cards, stationery, and artisan-made gifts.

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Results

The store exceeded projections and attracts dedicated volunteers as well as increasing visitors and shoppers to the beautiful garden.

“Miriam was a dream to work with! Her deep, broad knowledge of specialty retail was instrumental in getting our new store open on time and under budget. She studied what had been done with the previous store, engaging Board and volunteers in focus groups, then projected our new path and outcomes, planning all major operational processes and frameworks.

Without her extensive experience with architects, many of the details of our store design wouldn’t work well. Her resourcefulness in finding local artists and vendors of appropriate, high-quality goods is reflected in the unique assortment our visitors love. Miriam’s expert guidance on product selection and ongoing merchandising generates daily compliments from our visitors, months after the bloom of opening might have faded.”