Andrew Burton
April 2024
HOW TECHNOLOGY SPURS SECTOR GROWTH
For decades now, the garden centre industry is one that has been driven by passion, entrepreneurialism, care and ever-improving standards. Each garden centre has its own personality, reflecting the owners vision and personal drive, sometimes using gut feeling or instinct, and sometimes in a data driven strategic way, but it is often with a little of both.
I love our industry, and every day I get invigorated by the passionate people around me, both in our office and also throughout the businesses we work with. It is a unique industry, with lots of our businesses run by generational owners and new owners who are adding value.
At Pleydell Smithyman, we have been working in the industry for over 30 years, and despite all the challenges the sector faces, I continue to see our garden centre clients develop.
As part of any development journey, confidence and information are key factors when it comes to making a decision. We are in economic times where confidence in anything we invest in is needed, and as garden centres continue to develop, we are seeing technology changes throughout our businesses, helping owners to improve processes, productivity, service, and ease of shopping.
By giving more specific data and confidence to owners and management, what I am seeing is the dawn of even more technology to help data analysis, which is identifying clear information and taking the risk out of future development.
I go back to the turn of the millennium and much of the analysis I had to do as a garden centre manager was in-house and done through driving my own investigatory schemes. This work had some effect, but it still left lots of things undiscovered, with some risk of incorrect data. I would say we were able to clarify what we needed to at that time but that was because awareness of what we needed was less. What we were unable to do was to identify specific data that gave me a huge amount of information to help with risk-adverse promotional planning, floor plans, marketing, staffing requirements and product ranging.
Here we are in 2024, and often the information we need is at the touch of a button via EPoS reports and similar technological systems. However, here at Pleydell Smithyman, we are also using up-to-date technology that allows us to drive improved shop performance and customer-focused strategies – which in turn, can enable garden centres to increase revenue and mitigate risk with data-driven decisions. In essence, this technology allows us to use retail planning data and analytics to allow businesses to plan better and increase optimisation.
Using data that specialises in pin-pointing specific places and customer location intelligence, we are gaining more clarity than ever before.
This data can be used to gain information in a number of areas, and alongside other aspects, it helps to identify customer footfall and garden centre flow, helping to clarify opportunities in a number of ways. These include:
Seeing trends across footfall, geographic origin, demographic, and cross-visitation to identify gaps, avoid cannibalisation, and maximise the performance of your stores.
Identifying market potential by harnessing footfall traffic patterns and customer behaviour, to pinpoint high-potential areas for future expansion bespoke to the relevant site.
Using data to stay ahead of market trends with location insights through optimisation management, which effectively drives efficiency and revenue growth through data-driven decisions, utilising mobility insights to fine-tune operations, inventory management, and supply chain strategies.
This data enables us to have a clear view of visitor insights, understand their departmental travel behaviour, helps to understand poor performance as well as identify opportunities.
The impact that this has – if used effectively – can be massive, and it can help by:
Understanding trends more. This helps garden centres to plan for seasonal and marketing-driven trade in a more structured and planned manner, essentially helping with sales forecasting and process management, all helping profit.
Using the customer flow information. Shop floor layouts can then be maximised seasonally to drive sales through successful shop floor planning.
Understanding the peaks, troughs and processes. This data can help to maximise operational efficiency, again, increasing profit if managed well.
Using the demographic, which gives garden centres a detailed market analysis. This helps with buying ranging, marketing plans and overall customer propositions. This also includes seasonally changing demographics. I feel that when we understand who our customer is at any given time, this helps us to focus on key times and opportunities.
Giving clarity about customer movement information through your shop. Once this is understood, it helps with floor plan layouts and improving cold spots and working hot spots as well as possible.
The data analysis this technology gives us can create a real impact on any size business if used effectively. Whilst I feel it is important that we still use experience and creativity, it is also essential that data is used effectively.
At a time when the economy is changing, as well as customer needs are changing – and in fact, our customers are changing too – then this is the kind of data that gives us a head start. The cost of this service isn’t excessive either, and even basic analysis can help to add profit through improved retailing or improve efficiencies.
The world is moving, and our industry is one that pivots and reacts well, but it is also one that has enough awareness to use every tool in the box to help its business succeed. I think that technology is not one to fight, but it is something that all garden centres should welcome with open arms, identify what technology helps their centre best, and use it to the best of their ability.