Liebig Street will be home to the city's first indoor plant shop when Fiddle & Fern Road relocates to the main street on Friday.
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Co-manager Phoebe Clements said they'd been looking at Liebig Street to base the expanded business, which she described as an indoor plant wonderland.
Ms Clements said the store, which had moved from Koroit Street and began as a pop-up store to gauge customer interest, stocked high quality, high-end plants. It opens on Friday, November 10, 2023.
"The main difference now is we're holding a lot more plant-lovers gifts," she said. "We stock everything plant related."
The store sells collectable varieties, air and hydro plants which grow without soil as well as terrariums, books, everlasting flowers, indoor plant mix and sprays, candles, bath soaks, pots and planters, candles and gift packs. Taxidermy bugs and butterflies are also popular.
Ms Clements said she and her sister Michaella, who co-manages the store, had been looking at new premises for a while.
When women's clothing store Beach & Bay, which previously occupied the corner site, closed in mid-2023 Ms Clements contacted the real estate to see if they could become its new tenants.
She said a team of staff and local tradespeople had worked day and night to transform the store into a botanical oasis which featured a plant library.
Ms Clements said Liebig Street was a vibrant trading precinct and it was somewhere they'd aspired to be based.
"It's the brightness and the atmosphere of Liebig Street," she said. "Liebig Street holds more than the shops than people realise.
"You go to other small towns and they don't have a lot to offer, but if you come to Liebig Street it has a lot to offer."
She said the new-look store was part of a long-term vision the pair had for the business.
"It's become what we originally wanted it to become," she said. "It was only to be short term to begin with but the support of Warrnambool and surrounds made it into something more."
The sisters know the gardening industry having been brought up in and around their parents business, Pearson's Nursery in Allansford, which they've owned and operated for more than 20 years.
Fiddle & Fern Road offers a virtual consultancy and she said people could bring in or send them photos for advice about which plants would work where or why a certain plant wasn't thriving in a particular spot.
"We do consultations for indoor gardens for restaurants," she said. "We've recently done a lot of local pubs and restaurants."
Ms Clements said it was important to support small businesses and the shop stocked products from large and smaller operators, and its growers were like family.
"We couldn't do it without the community (of suppliers) we do have," she said.
She said the pair was grateful for the support the business had received since it first opened in 2020.
"Our customer support extends outside Warrnambool," she said. "We have people who have moved throughout COVID and stayed loyal to us. We have a worker that lives in Melbourne and delivers to our existing clients in Melbourne, Hamilton, Mount Gambier, Camperdown and Colac and everywhere."
