Czech Republic-based tractor manufacturer Zetor has opened a new building on the site of its factory at Brno that’s set to become a focal point for the brand’s fans, tractor owners and dealers from around the world. The Zetor Gallery, which was officially opened on June 13, cost £825,000 to build and is an impressive 1,200 square metre multi-purpose facility that combines several different functions.
For the general public, there’s a spare parts outlet and fan shop, a tractor showroom, a museum and educational exhibits covering the company’s history and tractor manufacture. For Zetor’s dealers and sales teams, meanwhile, the Zetor Gallery is a place to bring customers to learn more about the brand, as well as providing classrooms and workshops for technician and sales training courses.
Speaking before the Zetor Gallery was officially opened by Cardinal Dominik Duka, the Archbishop of Prague, Zetor Tractor’s Deputy Executive Director and Production Manager, Marian Lipovsky, said the new building acknowledged the strong following that the Zetor brand had.
“The Zetor Gallery provides another opportunity for tractor fans to meet and gain more information,” he added, “but moreover, we have designed it so that it will be of interest to families with children as well. Thus it offers a variety of audio-visual and interactive elements and, of course, the tractors themselves.”
There’s another side to the Zetor Gallery and that’s the perception the new building gives to the brand. Zetor’s tractors may have started to be built under communism, and for many years the number of tractors built took precedence over considerations of design and comfort, but today that has changed completely.
Zetor is now a profitable private company producing about 5,000 tractors annually that has adapted to put product quality at the centre of the operation. It has take the intrinsic reliability that has always been a major selling point of the tractors and used it as the basis for a range of models that includes the basic, low-spec Major and the high-spec, advanced Forterra HSX.
With that in mind, Mr Lipovsky is keen to see the new Zetor Gallery as the public face of the company, and more than that he feels it’s a template for new dealerships everywhere that Zetor tractors are sold.
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| The Zetor Gallery includes a museum area and interactive presentations on how Zetor tractors are built. |
Zetor UK’s sales and marketing manager, Maros Karabinos, agrees. “We are changing the product range to produce a more diverse offering that will give our dealers a better opportunity to make more money,” he said, “but at the same time this investment in the Zetor Gallery sets a standard for our dealers for what can be done.
“It’s a benchmark for how we would like the brand to be portrayed in the market, and presents a template for how we want Zetor to appear to our customers. The product has moved on and we’d like to see our dealers develop too.”
About 80 per cent of the new two-storey Zetor Gallery will be open to the public, with the rest used for meeting rooms and training facilities for the Zetor group. The public area of the centre has been designed as an open space divided into several themed sections. The first section is a showroom where the company’s current tractor range is on display, while the extensive history of the manufacturer is presented in the other sections.
The Zetor Gallery currently includes a total of 14 tractor exhibits, including the oldest Z25 model. The history of the company is also presented in a series of poster displays and in an audio-visual presentation that was prepared after sorting through 43 hours of archive film. An interesting feature on the second floor of the Zetor Gallery is a large display that’s made up of about 10,000 different photographs, largely provided by fans of the brand, that spell out the Zetor name.
Naturally, there’s a gift shop that’s bound to please fans with items related to the Zetor brand, but this shop is also intended for the owners of Zetor tractors as they will be able to purchase a selection of the most frequently used spare parts during their visit to the Zetor Gallery.
Among the first visitors to the new facility from the UK will be customers who buy a new Zetor Forterra HSX tractor during July and August 2013. They will all be rewarded with a three-day visit for two to the historic city of Brno, including flights, accommodation – and a outing to the Zetor Gallery.
The Zetor Gallery is situated at Zetor Tractors’ site at Trnkova 111, Brno, in the Czech Republic. The opening hours are Monday to Friday from 10:00am to 6:00pm. Admission is free, although large groups are advised to book in advance. More information on visiting the gallery is available by email from: [email protected]
For more information visit: www.zetor.co.uk.
