Editor’s note: This story has been updated since its original publication to correct the location of the Clegg’s Nursery where Johnny Naylor serves as a sales consultant to Siegen Lane.
After four decades in business running his own hardware and gardening store, Johnny Naylor spent this holiday shopping season selling Christmas trees and other seasonal items in someone else’s store.
In the wake of the August flood, Naylor’s Hardware and Gardening Center, a longtime neighborhood institution on Old Hammond Highway, merged with another beloved local business, Clegg’s Nursery, which was also damaged during the flood at two of its four locations.
In the months since, Naylor has been adjusting to the new partnership and to his new role as a sales consultant at Clegg’s Siegen Lane location. So far, he says it’s better than he would have expected.
“Christmas was good,” he says. “I did the same thing I normally would I just didn’t have to stay until nine o’clock every night and I didn’t have all the headaches that come with being in charge.”
Naylor says holiday sales were strong at Clegg’s Siegen Lane and Donmoor Avenue stores, and better than expected at Denham Springs in Livingston Parish. Only the Greenwell Springs Road location was slow, which Naylor attributes to the fact that so many residents in the area are not yet back in their homes.
Now that the holiday season is nearing an end, Naylor says it’s time to get back to adding more of the Naylor’s product lines into the Clegg’s stores, specifically vegetable plants and bulk seeds, as well as hardware items.
“In the Siegen store, our first order of hardware products comes in the first week of January, and at the Denham Springs store, their order comes in the week after that,” he says. “So we’re just trying to put up counters and get all this done before springtime.”
Last season, spring came early—mid-February—and given the unusually temperate winter so far, there’s no reason to think this year will be any different, he says. That means the next few weeks will be busy.
“We’ll be scrambling,” Naylor says.
As for the property on Old Hammond Highway, Naylor has retained a commercial real estate agent to help market it but he’s not officially listing it yet and doesn’t plan to in the immediate future.
“We’re not that actively going after it, though if anybody has a request for that area he would show it to them,” Naylor says. “But I’m not going to fire sale it. I’m going to wait and see what happens in that area.”
—Stephanie Riegel
