Opening up

Photos courtesy of Harnois

Based in Oley, Pennsylvania, Glick’s Greenhouse grows vegetables, annuals and perennials. They also have a strong on-site retail business.

According to owner Ben Glick, the nephew of the original owner, one of the company’s biggest challenges was their retail space.

“It was a lot of mix-and-match, a lot of used quonset structures that my uncle had found and patched together over the years,” Glick said. “Nothing was the same, it was one greenhouse here, one greenhouse there. It made it unique, but it was a maze for the customers and created smaller aisles.”

Enter Harnois. In 2021, Glick’s worked with Harnois to purchase and build new gutter-connected greenhouses for a revamped retail space. The decision to upgrade came easy after strong sales during COVID gave them the necessary capital.

“We finally had the finances to go ahead and do this full revamp,” he says. “We’d been dreaming of it for years, to build a big gutter-connected retail center so we could have an open floor and wide aisles and that kind of stuff.”

Harnois was their supplier of choice, Glick says, because of the quality of the structure. With retail needs and changing seasons in Pennsylvania, Glick’s needed greenhouses that will hold up.

“I needed the beefiness,” he says. “With the winter here, we never know whether we are going to get snow or not. And we usually get 14,000 people through here in a couple of days in the winter for a holiday event. Working with them, we got the renovated roof and a great, strong structure. I feel safe having tons of customers in there.” He adds that, in the same footprint as they had before, the space has more than doubled.

Glick says the best part of the new build is how much easier it is to organize products. Before, he says, it was hard to label everything and know what was where.

“With the open floor plan, customers see just how much material is here,” he says. “A lot of our old structures were very old quonsets, very low houses, so there wasn’t a lot of head room or areas that the customers could shop. They were built as a growing greenhouse. And as we grew over the years, and had more and more customers, we needed to turn over that square footage. We needed this.”