We were very grateful last year as an industry for the non-gardening areas of our members’ businesses standing up and performing. I include in this, categories such as catering, food halls and farm shops, clothing and of course giftware. Their performance in the face of the awful weather really demonstrated the benefits that they have in supporting the overall business. It’s a great credit to the industry that it has managed to develop to offer this year-round, all weather attraction, so if key gardening categories cannot perform then something else will.
Our Garden Centre Association (GCA) Barometer of Trade (BoT) for the year to date so far shows Giftware sales up 7.69% compared to the same period in 2024. In February, Giftware actually showed the highest growth in any of our retail categories at plus 10.55%. A really very strong performance but again at a time when the weather was discouraging any sort of gardening activity. As I write this the sun is shining and I hear from our members that sales are very strong, so long may the sun shine!
We recent held our GCA annual conference at the De Vere Hotel, Wokefield Park near Reading. This was attended by almost 400 members and had a great buzz to it with presentations from our team of inspectors, great external speakers and hearing what other parts of our industry are up to. From our compulsory spring inspections, we get scores for every garden centre member in every retail category and from this we announce overall winners at the conference. We divide the membership up into three turnover bands to keep things fair, so every category has three winners.
In the Indoor Lifestyle category our winning garden centre in the Destination Garden Centre class was Bents Garden and Home; with Garsons at Esher and Ruxley Manor coming in second and third.
In the Garden Centre class the winners, yes it was a tie, were two of the Squires family being Woking and Wokingham with Garsons Titchfield in second and another tie for third between Fron Goch and Ransoms in Jersey.
In the Local Garden Centre class, the winner was Rutland Nurseries with Raglan in second and a tie for third between Millbrook Staplehurst and Squires Reigate.
These winning centres were getting scores in the high 80 to low 90 percents and as I know how reluctant our inspection team are to give any factor a 10 out of 10, for which the criteria is ‘Outstanding’, they really are first class across all disciplines within this category.
There are 10 different factors, each scored out of 10, and then a weighting is applied to the overall score which is based on that category’s percentage of total garden centre sales. The factors are: physical environment, cleanliness and hygiene, layout and flow, merchandising and stock management, product offer, product quality, display, signage and point of sale, product promotion and other services. Within each factor are specific criteria that the inspector must be able to see. I can’t see anything but overall standards continuing to rise so I’m looking forward to this year’s scores. The inspectors have just started our 2025 visits too. Good luck to all.
