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Business & Tech

Color Pesche's Business Practices Savvy as Des Plaines' Most Enduring Flower-garden Store

It's a practice as old as the River Road institution itself -- put the brightest colors where the eye first looks and the customer will then walk the greenhouse and other parts of the store.

Walk into at 170 S. River Road, make a quick right turn and you’re immediately struck by the display of bright colors – reds, pinks and purples – blazing from a flower-display table in the attached greenhouse.

Even in the dead of winter, Chris Pesche still doesn’t miss an opportunity to attract a customer’s eye. Color is everything in the home-and-garden business.

That was a truism when his grandfather Fred Pesche, a Luxembourger, first set up shop nearly 90 years ago in Des Plaines. And it certainly applies now when the survivor of the city’s long tradition of hard-working greenhouses is at the slow point of its annual business cycle, but also entering its “spring training” for the blooming times ahead.

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“If you walk in a store, you always know people look to the right,” said the personable Pesche, taking a quick break from rounds to start re-stocking, re-seeding and re-constructing various parts of his family business to prepare for the outdoor flora and fauna sales season beginning around April 1.

“When you walk into our entrance, first thing you do is look to the right and the color will grab your eye,” he said. “When you think of flowers and plants, the first thing you think of is color.”

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Casual plant lovers won’t stray far from the multi-hued prime displays, which on this day remained next to an empty area that held holiday plants, long since departed. Serious flora and fauna devotees know to work their way back to where standard-issue green dominates.

“If you want the cactus and succulents, you’re exactly right,” said Pesche. “You sort of work your way in. It’s all common sense. What catches their attention, No. 1? And once you have their attention, how do you bring them back further and further into your store. That’s the way our garden center is set up in the summer. Set up the color in front, people drive by and get the message: We’re open, stop in.”

Greenhouses once dotted the city

Pesche’s indoor-outdoor complex sprawls over seven acres, the largest and most durable of the flower merchants that once distinguished Des Plaines.   Greenhouses dotted the developing city earlier in the 20th Century.   Traggor’s greenhouse was a Pesche’s neighbor just to the north on River Road through the 1950’s. Dahm’s and Klippert’s greenhouses existed side-by-side on Oakton, across from what is now Maine West High School. Kellen’s greenhouse plied its trade at Golf and Mt. Prospect roads.

“Mostly, everyone came from Europe -- Germany, Luxembourg,” Pesche said. “A lot of flower growers came from Luxembourg. Nothing was built up at the time. River Road was a dirt road. You drove out to Libertyville, it was like driving to Minnesota. You needed land. When you built greenhouses, you built greenhouses -- they were 300, 400 feet long.”

Pesche now offers a mix of the traditional and cutting-edge. Flowers and accessories are the base of the business. But he operates differently  compared to Fred Pesche’s pioneer days coming off the boat in 1923.

The younger Pesche has cut the length most of greenhouses in half, to 120 feet,  to save on maintenance. Ceilings are less breakable than the old glass. He is  further reconstructing several of his greenhouses. He’s opening a “fairy garden” in the accessories department to attract children and their parents. He has a bird section. Economizing by not having to pay for water from the city, Pesche’s has a retention pond to collect rain-water, used to irrigate the plants.

Chris Pesche is far from the only expert on the premises. When she’s not tending to the construction of the fairy garden and the start of a spring plant display, Catherine Willis can advise determined off-season gardeners on how to bring that color in from the cold. A seven-year veteran at the garden center, Willis previously worked for Chris Pesche’s aunt in the floral business.

Counsel for indoor color

“If you’re going to bring in plants from the garden, they have be ones that adapt to your light conditions,” she said. “Also, treat the plants outside before you bring them in for insects – we call them hitchhikers. You really need to start that in August.

“Flowering plants for indoor horticulture will bloom anywhere from two to eight weeks. You’ll sometimes have to change them out if you want that constant color in the house. A lot of plants don’t like the heat vent blowing down on them. And you have to put a plant near a full-sun window, south or west.”

Such personalized counsel for plant lovers is a necessity for Chris Pesche, who faces a different kind of competition compared to his grandfather. Flowers are the family business, not the loss leader for big-box hardware/home furnishings stores and grocery outlets using the same dazzling color to draw consumers in to buy their staples further back in the buildings.

“I’ve had many people say, ‘Why don’t you move out to Hampshire?,’” he said.  “’Why don’t you move out to Huntley, where real-estate taxes are a third what you’re paying here?’ Problem is, I would not have the clientele we have here today. Everybody’s gotten into the florist’s industry.

“We have that knowledge. We can give them the right materials for their problems. We have microscopes under which we can put their plant leaves, diagnose what’s wrong.”

Pesche likes where he is.

“People see us driving by,” he said. “They say 10,000 cars go by us daily on River Road.”

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