Deer Trail To Celebrate New Home
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
A full catered lunch and prize drawings throughout the day are planned as part of grand opening activities on Wednesday at Deer Trail Implement, west of Emporia on U.S. Highway 50.
Manger Richard Garber said that lunch, catered by Coburn’s Restaurant, will include brisket, Fanestil beans, cole slaw and dessert.
“We’re going to feed everybody well,” Garber said, talking of preparations for the event. “We’ve just been so busy. All the employees have been just working day and night to get it ready.”
Deer Trail employees also have set up 50 tables to accommodate guests throughout the serving, which will run from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
A ribbon-cutting will be held at 11:30 a.m., with a number of Deere and Company officials planning to be present. Among them will be John D. Lagemann, vice president of sales; Robert Timmons, sales branch manager; and Wally Phillips, division sales manager, all from Deere’s North American Marketing Center in Kansas City. Some of them will speak briefly at the ribbon-cutting and during the meal.
John Deere gift cards in varying amounts will be given in drawings during the day.
“The reason we chose to go that direction is no matter what your occupation is, we’ve got something,” he said. With the new building’s assortment of toys, clothing and merchandise, “we’ve got something even if you don’t have anything John Deere.”
The grand opening celebrates Deer Trail’s new home, which opened in November.
The new building has proven to be all that owners and employees had hoped it would be.
“We’re tickled to death,” Garber said. “We’re really thrilled. It’s functional and practical, and we’re able to operate so much more efficiently than we were in the old building because we have the added space.
“Outside, we can display — showcase equipment as it should be, instead of just jamming it in any place we can find like we had to do in the old building. We’re very happy with it.”
The new building gives the company 35,000 square feet of floor space and 15 acres for customer parking and equipment display. The former building had about 11,000 square feet on 1.5 acres.
The building had been in the planning stages since Deer Trail acquired the John Deere dealership 2 1/2 to 3 years ago. Construction, at a cost of about $2.3 million, began in February 2006, and moving in was done over a three-day weekend in November. Hastco was general contractor.
Deer Trail now houses a spacious showroom floor, a room for children’s toys and accessories, and separate maintenance and repair areas for large equipment and for lawn and landscaping equipment. The large-equipment shop burns waste oil to supply fuel for the radiant-heat floors.
The building also contains lockers and a shower room, extensive inventory shelves, a library with computers and books for technical reference, and a mezzanine for computer servers and a break room. The showroom floor is made of a relatively new seamless product made of layers of epoxy, quartz crystals and colored grit.
A conference room, with an outside entrance for after-hours meetings, will hold about 50 people for agriculture-related meetings and programs.
“When it comes to customer relations, public relations, Deer Trail never has taken a back seat,” Garber said. “They’ve always stepped up to the plate.”