Another year draws to a close and as usual there have been both highs and lows to celebrate and endure. The recent budget being a significant low for small and medium-sized businesses across all sectors of industry. The good news is that the end of the year is always very busy with the Christmas season being the best for sales in many garden centres nowadays.
It is also very encouraging to see that giftware sales over the last three months in the Garden Centre Association (GCA) Barometer of Trade (BoT) have been up on average by more than 10% across this period. This has resulted in a small uplift year-to-date of +2.5%. Christmas trade now accounts for approximately 10% of a garden centre’s total annual income and when combined with total giftware sales shows these two categories accounting for approximately 25% of all garden centre sales.
Our BoT is created from the actual sales figures from more 90 of our members, so is a very reliable source of information regarding sales and trends.
Christmas is also an area where we are acutely aware that changes need to be made to make the category more in tune with our customers’ sustainable agendas.
However, great strides are being made here with GCA members looking at sourcing as much product as possible closer to home. They are actively looking to work with their suppliers to eradicate unnecessary packaging and waste, and to ensure products are made from recycled materials and that they can be recycled once they are no longer needed.
They look for wooden products to come with the FSc logo on them telling our customers that the wood is from a sustainable source. In Christmas departments things like glitter, made from non-recyclable materials, is no longer on or in products, crackers don’t have plastic, pointless gifts and the quality of products are such that they will last a long time.
These initiatives have been supported by changes we have made to our inspection criteria that our team of four independent inspectors look for while on their unannounced visits in the spring. I am very excited by the speed of change in this critical area of our members’ businesses.
We have just held another of our very successful webinars on the topic of Retail Security. As we all know the level of crime rises significantly at this time of year so it was a very useful discussion around what centres could do to reduce some of the risk.
We had excellent presentations from Nathan Wilson from Blue Diamond, Mark Gilbert from Tates Garden Centres in Sussex and from Corin Denison from Insight Retail Risk.
It was good to hear some positive news in the budget around this, such as removing the £200 limit below which police were not entitled to attend. If you missed this and would like to see their presentations, please do get in touch with me via peter@gca.org.uk.
Our next big event is our annual Conference from January 26 until 29 at the De Vere Wokefield Park near Reading. Bookings are going very well and the booking platform is located on our website in the members’ section and also via www.gca.digitickets.co.uk/tickets.
We’re kicking off our 2025 event on the Sunday, January 26, with a brilliant Retail Safari in the capital led by renowned retail expert, Matthew Brown. Matthew is the founder and director of a retail trend agency called Echochamber. He runs retail safaris in the world’s best shopping cities to inform and inspire and is a regular keynote speaker at retail conferences worldwide. Matthew will help our members who attend, navigate the buzzing districts of London to give them a clear picture of what the best retail looks like on the ground.
For further information, please visit www.gca.org.uk.
