Anniversary

It's just about a year since I started my company and I guess I'd like to say a big thank you to all those that have supported me in many ways. It has been a successful year and I feel the next year will be even better.
More to follow.

Make the most if it.

I came across this picture on morguefile.com by blue lotus studio while searching for lifestyle images for a client. It just goes to show that you can always make the most of a bad situation by creating a promotion.

Get Moving

With most peoples credit cards maxed out and funds pretty tight, January can be a strange month. The sales will usually mop up the last bit of disposable income in most pockets so it’s usually February before spending gets back to anything approaching normal. Customers could be scarce for the next few weeks!
With that in mind, it’s a great time to spring clean your establishment and get started on the layout for your furniture and lifestyle section. Try and get all the noisy, messy bits out of the way before you have a lost of customers around.
Create a plan and a time scale and stick to it. You won’t have much time once things kick of in the spring to re-do it.
Get moving!

This Autumn has been fantastic and has, in some ways, helped to improve the plant sales for the year. Certainly it’s been a cracking August, September and October (so far!).
Now more than ever it’s important to have your customer flow, merchandising and POS looking sharp. Although a good October will never make up for a good May it can still be a very lucrative time of year with customers looking for bigger specimens and nice topiary perhaps.
So keep it sharp and tidy.
Don’t forget to contact me if you need a hand or advice!

Shop Around

In horticultural retailing the norm seems to be to visit other garden centres to try to learn from, or improve on, what they are doing. Although we all know that this is certainly a helpful exercise it does tend to limit your ideas from a general retailing point of view. Most good ideas don’t come from garden centres but from high street (or these days retail park) shops. Yet when have you ever heard of a group of garden centres descending on a group of non-gardening retailers en masse to try to learn from, discuss and apply what they are doing? I think it’s the exception rather the norm.
I this day and age it is no longer good enough to just look at the best retailers in gardening, we also need to look into the best retailers in general. For example when did you ever visit an Aldi or Lidl? Too proud to walk through their doors? I bet your bank manager and his missus aren’t!
Open your eyes to more retailers. Check out the most profitable and pay them a visit. I guarantee you will learn at least one important thing from them.

Quote

Came across this quote recently and thought you might like to read it.

“It’s not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred with the sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause and who, at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

(Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1919, 26th US
President and 1906 Nobel Peace Prizewinner.)

A Rabbit Story with a Moral!

A while ago, when working with a garden centre with a pet shop I was dismayed to discover that for Easter, one of the busiest bunny selling periods, all they had for sale were a couple of large, plain, boring rabbits. I questioned the girl that was running the pet shop at the time and she informed me of the problem.
The policy at the time was to give suppliers as little as possible for their livestock so that the pet shop could remain as competitive as possible with a nice healthy margin.
Of course what this meant was that the suppliers would sell all their good stock to other pet shops who gave them more for their rabbits and left this place with whatever was left over.
We changed this around and gave the suppliers a fair price, and maybe a bit more, in return for the best they had and a guaranteed purchase of x amount of rabbits over the season.
Sales went up because we had beautiful bunnies (like the one in the picture here) and we sold tons of accessories.
I don’t think I need to point out the moral of the story. Do I? Nor does this only apply to bunnies!