LaCour’s Carpet World has slated a December soft opening for its new location at 4665 Perkins Road, with a grand opening planned for January.
The family-owned business is relocating to the busy Perkins Road corridor near College Drive after 43 years on Tom Drive in north Baton Rouge.
David LaCour, whose parents founded the company in 1969, says relocating to the Southdowns area is a better fit for the store’s retail customers, who come primarily from neighborhoods in the 70808 and 70809 ZIP codes.
“It didn’t matter as much to our industrial customers where we were located,” LaCour says. “But it was hard getting our retail customers to go out there.”
LaCour’s acquired the building—a vacant former Kean’s Dry Cleaners location—in mid-July for $650,000 from Kean’s owner Rock Rockenbaugh, who’d been trying to sell the building for several years.
The move will mean a significant reduction in floor space for the company. The Tom Drive location is 17,000 square feet, including a 5,000-square-foot warehouse. The new location is less than half that big. But the company doesn’t need to house as much inventory as it did in the past because of changes in the industry.
“We can order from the manufacturer now in job-lot quantities and still get the product on time,” LaCour says. “So we don’t need to keep as much inventory on hand.”
Also, the existing store is wasting some showroom space on samples of products that rarely sell, LaCour says.
“Our new showroom will be smaller but it will be a curated collection of things that we’re actually selling,” he says.
LaCour is enthusiastic about the new location’s proximity to Rouzan and other nearby retailers—Stanton’s Appliance, Harrison Paint Company, Sherwin Williams and Sprout’s—that, he says, have a good synergy and complement each other.
“Wonderful things are happening in the area,” he says. “We’re looking forward to being in a retail corridor where people are out shopping.”
The company’s Tom Drive location will be acquired later this year by JM Test Systems, a longtime next-door neighbor that has plans to expand its facility.
