Attention, Plant Lovers! You Have To Visit This New "Experiential" Garden Store

Urban gardeners, rejoice! A new haven is born just a couple of months ago, and it’s sure to be your new go-to place for everything and anything gardening related. Just an hour drive south, new concept store Qach Lifestyle & Garden offers a variety of planting essentials that are not just affordable but also pretty cool and unique!

 

 

Qach Lifestyle and Garden started out from owner Ludette Querubin’s love for greens, so incorporating plants in her home has always been a must for her. But it got frustrating, she shares, as her choices for pots are limited to terracotta, ceramic, or cement. She had to find an option—and she did, eventually, during a trip to Holland in Netherlands. There, she found a gardening heaven.

 

 

“It so happens that I have a brother-in-law who’s a Dutch. So when we visited, he brought us to garden centers and there are so many of them that you’d want to spend the whole day there! There were just thousands of square meters with all the nice plants and pots. And when I looked at the prices, they’re really reasonable,” she shared. The next thing she did was send an e-mail to Capi Europe, one of the biggest companies in Europe that carries unique and eco-friendly gardening essentials, when she got back in the Philippines. She got a reply from them and their partnership was born.

 

 

Soon, Ludette was also able to talk to garden pots brand Elho, and today, both brands are exclusively housed in Qach’s quaint spaces in Solenad 3 and Alabang Town Center. Bringing in these brands for the store created a good mix of items perfect for all types of gardeners. And that’s what they aim to be: a place to educate and entice homeowners to put up a green space, whether they live in a condo or a house with a garden.

 

 

What’s interesting about Qach is how they created an “experiential store” to enhance the shopping experience. Inside, the display of plants, pots, and other tools are nicely set up. Music is playing on the background, to make shoppers feel at ease. Glass walls bring the light in; the warm and well-lit interiors brighten up shoppers' stay. Murals of home areas adorn the walls and show ways on where one can place plants. Having a conversation with the staffers about green living completes the Qach experience, too. For those who drove all the way to the south, they also have merchandise to take home as souvenirs, like keychains and notebooks with designs of native Philippines plant species (like calamansi and makahiya)!

 

 

“We build a relationship with the people who come in here,” says Jamie Blomdahl, Qach’s Marketing & Store Operations Manager. It’s really about trying to encourage people to make green a lifestyle, and so far, Qach is able to keep up with this vision. Kids who came with their parents to Qach also inspired them to launch Qach Kids soon, and apart from this line, they’re also planning to conduct gardening workshops for everyone. Now, there’s really no excuse not to become a plant parent, yes?

 

 

Photography by Paola Aseron