A different perspective: Niche, or Not?

With the focus of this issue’s cover story being on niche products and areas within the garden centre to give consumers greater reason to visit I thought it might be interesting to reflect on some United Kingdom experiences.

Creating a niche for your garden centre can, at times, be a double-edged sword in that it has distinct possibilities of improving the levels of core business but there is also the possibility that that it may indeed hamper its progression.

From my own experience, in the early ’80s/late ’90s, I was general manager at Wheatcroft Garden Centre, Nottingham, England, which was (and still is) a very nice, large centre with a great location and a good deal of investment.

Wheatcroft as I am sure some of you (perhaps the older readers!) will know were one of the major international rose growers in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It was a business led by the inimitable, flamboyant Harry Wheatcroft who was friends with the rich and famous and created newspaper headlines wherever he went. Hence the buying public automatically associated the name with roses and even after eight years of development, investment, publicity, promotions etc. there were still people who lived within a stone’s throw of the centre that still only associated the site with roses. This may be an extreme example but does highlight that consumers have to understand what the garden centre stands for and offers.

On the other hand, I know many great garden centres that have built a reputation for something outside of traditional horticulture such as gift, farm, or cook shops.

Restaurants and cafés (called “catering” in the UK) are something which have, in the UK, now gone beyond being a niche area and are now an expectation of a potential visitor that they will be able to relax with a good quality offering of both food and drink. Indeed restaurants and cafés account for somewhere around 20 percent of the average garden centre’s annual turnover.

What does strike me as being important though, in the long term, is that firstly we need to create a very good reason for people to get into their cars and drive out to our garden centres and, also, the add-ons need to be complimentary and enhance the experience of the store rather than in any way detract from it or simply fill in space. With restaurants and cafés, for example, there is a wonderful opportunity to link it to plants through the ingredients in use and highlighting how and where to grow them. A recent BBC report suggested that almost a third of children interviewed thought that cheese was made from plants and one in ten thought tomatoes grow underground! Now if those two statistics in isolation are unable to inspire us, then I really hold very little hope for our future. The options in restaurants are everywhere, from living walls of herbs, pots on each table, staff knowledgeable about the plants being used in different recipes and the introduction of some theatre.

For a great example of theatre I turn to Jamie Oliver. Dining in his West London restaurant one night the subdued atmosphere was broken by a mad Italian chef running from the kitchens to the rows of herb troughs outside screaming, “We have no rosemary!” Now, I am convinced that a top Jamie Oliver restaurant does not run out of rosemary at 7:30 p.m. but it certainly caused a stir and got people talking about the ingredients and the freshness of cutting them from the walls outside.

Secondly, communities throughout history have always needed a venue where they could come together to celebrate, communicate and integrate their separate lives. This facility may, at various times, have been provided by the church, school, local hall or bar, most of which have by now disintegrated.

There is, without doubt, the opportunity for garden centres to fulfill this role in the absence of the previous venues. This may be by inviting local community groups to use the centre for meetings, creating community gardens, building allotments onsite for public use or by developing a programme of educational and inspirational evenings at the centre.

Whatever way each individual centre decides to go, the most important factor is in having a clear goal of what the outcomes should be and then doggedly ensuring that these are realised.

Kevin has worked as an independent garden center consultant to retailers, suppliers, DIY stores and trade organizations all over the world since 1995. Before that time he was a garden centre manager with 3 leading UK garden retailers. kevin@thegardenworks.co.uk