Keep your garden center in tip-top shape this spring

Shelf stocking in spring can be a constant battle. Your store staff is working hard to keep pace with register traffic and phones, which can leave your shelves looking a bit worse for wear. The sales staff on the floor is juggling customers and plant maintenance. Even so, the last thing you can afford to do during your peak traffic times is allow your shelves and tables to become under-stocked and unorganized. You need to make your stocking strategy work as hard for you as it can independent of sales staff. While you still may have to resort to some after-hours stocking, here are a few springtime strategies to keep your shelves in tip-top shape during open hours.
 

Tweak the layout

The first step to properly stocked hard goods’ shelves is a good layout plan. You can learn a lot about how to best stock your shelves from your local grocery store. The goal is to match the customer with the right product as fast as possible without assistance.

• Top shelf: Smaller or local brands, specialty items.
• Eye-level shelves: Your best sellers and top brands. Highest price and margin items.
• Bottom shelf: Your private-label brands and large or bulk items.
   

Place all of the higher priced/margin items to the right side of the shelf. Enforce a standard for where price stickers are positioned on your hard goods. The more customers have to hunt for the price tag, the more unorganized shelves become.
 

Make a visual map

Map out your shelves and tables; decide exactly how much of each product equates to full-stock and where each product should go. Take photos of each indoor shelf section. Print product quantities and full page photos of each section and keep them in a few three-ring binders. For plant tables, laminate outdoor maps for plant category sections. Include instructions for where to put product if tables are full. Support staff or new seasonal employees can then quickly refer to the visual maps when restocking or when areas are out of sorts.
 

Create stocking staging areas

How far does your staff have to travel to pull up back stock? The farther they have to go, the longer restocking will take and the less available they’ll be to customers. Look for underutilized sales areas where you can stage your extra spring back stock. Shelving extra key hard goods in the “dead zone” behind the register and doors can make it easy for your cashiers to more quickly restock store shelves with popular items. Consider lining entryways or walkways with tables of back stock plant material.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, digital content marketing, branding design, advertising and social media support for green industry companies. www.lesliehalleck.com