NEWS

In the world of garden centres, where plants, people, and retail all come together, it’s easy to focus on the practical side of the business—product ranges, layouts, or seasonal displays. But one thing that often gets overlooked is the role that thoughtful, consistent graphic design plays in shaping how your centre looks, feels, and performs.

Our core values—Passion, Empathy, Solution Focus, and Partnership—are more than just words. They shape our thinking, guide our relationships, and support a ‘client first’ approach in all aspects of our work.

This tailored Health Check is designed to offer practical support by identifying ways to strengthen profitability and efficiency, without adding unnecessary complexity or cost.

Running a garden centre isn’t just about selling beautiful plants or having the best cafe—it’s about growing a thriving, efficient, and competitive business. And just like plants need the right conditions to flourish, your business needs the right insights to grow.

At Pleydell Smithyman we are aware that the weather has a massive impact on trade, so we do a monthly weather forecast review in our news articles.

Running a garden centre isn't just about keeping things going and plants alive—it’s about keeping your business driving forward and...

Pleydell Smithyman have recently been working with a number of garden centres and farm shops that are focusing on website and marketing awareness for their customers.

It has been a great start to the gardening season, with the good weather having a really positive impact on trade.  As we have seen in Garden Centre Associaion Barometre of Trade and the HTA Market Updates, trade is up, and the weather has been a massive factor in this!

There is no hiding from it, and we all know it; technology developments and AI are buzzwords on everyone’s lips.

Monkton Elm Garden Centre embarked on an exciting re-development to refurbish and extend their highly regarded and popular Elm Tree Restaurant. 

As we step into 2025, the year of courage, businesses are bracing for a transformative journey. The government policy and tax changes of 2024 have posed significant challenges, leading to increased costs across the industry.

It’s a changing world. It seems that since 2020, we have been going through an ever-evolving life. The word ‘Permacrisis’ hit the Oxford English dictionary in 2022, a word describing the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability.

What has changed in the past few years? In short, pretty much everything! Garden centres are not standing still –  they are improving! 

On the 12th April 2023 Staverton Nursery, experienced a devastating fire which destroyed half of their retail space, coffee shop and offices. Eighteen months later, Staverton Nursery, near Lewes in East Sussex have rebuilt and opened its brand new restaurant and food hall on 23rd October 2024.

For years now Garden Centres have been impacted by the weather.  This year has been no difference and in the Horticulture Trade Association July Market Update, they reported that challenging trading conditions for garden centres continued in June 2024 due to ongoing adverse wet weather, which significantly affected sales in core gardening categories.

Essentially, what we have observed, especially since the turn of the century, is the personalities of our garden centres changing, allowing different businesses to have different brands and propositions, with the aim to give their customers more choice and create a point of difference for themselves.

It is an interesting word ‘sustainability’. It is a word that is on everyone’s lips and it’s something that is so important to our garden centre industry.

There are a lot more areas for businesses to look at when looking at their costs vs profit, and what journey each individual business goes on depends on ‘where they are in their journey already.’

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.

Planning ahead doesn’t come easily to everyone – sometimes due to time restraints or higher priorities, or because of team size and skillset – however, as a leader of your business, failing to consider your vision and strategy will often come back to bite you.