Analysis: Is garden centre retailing on the brink of an online revolution?

To set the ball rolling, earlier this year the former Tesco-owned garden centre group, which has 35 units, penned a deal with online grocery specialist Ocado – at which Dobbies chairman Andrew Bracey was once finance director – to quickly ramp up its online offer and home delivery service.

But green-fingered Marshall is far from satisfied. He thinks the sector, in which he has been immersed for more than 30 years, has much potential in the digital world.

Is ecommerce a worthwhile mission?

Currently, 15% of all retail sales are made online, according to the latest ONS figures, however, Marshall says this is “rising at the speed of light”.

But online garden centre sales are “almost non-existent”, he adds.

By their very nature, gardening products – like fresh food – do not fit with ease into the digital world of warehouses and deliveries. 

The painfully slow speed of online migration in this category has caused some division about how best to proceed.

Among the three market leaders – Wyevale Garden Centres, Dobbies and Blue Diamond – the extent to which ecommerce has been prioritised varies wildly

Where 20-centre operator Blue Diamond argues that investment in online will be fruitless, Marshall believes it represents a vast and fertile opportunity.

Andy Newman, a garden retail expert from consultancy firm mdj2, is on the fence.

On the one hand, he believes online is enabling the sector’s bigger players to access fresh terrain where they don’t have store coverage to help them become “truly national”.

He also points out how compatible some bulkier garden products, such as furniture, are to online retailing.

However, Newman has doubts about the consumer demand for plants online, given the impulsive nature of this kind of purchase.

“There’s a slow growth towards it,” he says, “but unlike planned purchases such as barbecues, plants tend to be bought on impulse, based on their particular appearance and the unpredictable weather.

“There’s an opportunity online for plants, but it’s not the category in which garden centres will flourish.”

Should garden centres branch out?

Newman’s cautious sentiment is echoed by Blue Diamond managing director Alan Roper, who tells Retail Week he’s in no hurry to launch a transactional website.

After carrying out research, the UK’s third largest gardening group found the competitive threat from online gardening retailing to be negligible.

Comparing it to when mail-order first launched, Roper says demand is limited because of the high risk of large, expensive plants being damaged in transit.

“The only category that’s competitive online is barbecues because they come in a box,” he says.

The retailer has taken a “forensic approach” to sourcing instead, which it believes will differentiate it from online players. 

Roper says the company has created “must visit” environments by directly targeting its customer base – “avoiding the catch-all attitude” of some of its competitors. 

Unlike many garden centre operators Blue Diamond does not have concession partners, which Roper says “create a clash” and cause stores to resemble “a C1 high street with an everyday, boring, value-driven offer”.

Roper believes a discerning approach and focusing on own-brand products cushions the group from the potential threat of online.

Still, he admits the door to the online world has been left ajar.

“I don’t see the need to rush online at the moment. You’ll struggle to find anyone making money doing that. But that’s not to say we won’t look to do it in five or 10 years’ time – my job is to keep an open mind.”

The Dobbies’ way

But for Marshall, the door is wide open.

Since taking the helm a few months ago, following the surprise exit of John Cleland, the former Wyevale Garden Centres chief and founder of Country Gardens has got his hands dirty.

He has launched a new, souped-up food offer with longer restaurant opening hours, table service and food-to-go to draw in shoppers. He is also planning to install children’s play areas and is pushing Dobbies’ horticultural credentials through its marketing.

But he hopes his tour de force will be to guide garden centres once and for all into the brave new world of etailing.

“The overall gardening market is valued at £4bn, and one day 40% of that £4bn will be online. There’s just so much to go for. So much,” he tells Retail Week during a visit to its flagship store and headquarters in Melville, Scotland.

Marshall calls Dobbies’ tie-up with fulfilment-savvy Ocado “brilliant”.

It enables the UK’s second-largest garden centre retailer to very quickly get ahead with delivering larger items, and in locations Dobbies does not have coverage.

“The crossover with its six million customers is spot on too,” he adds.

For Marshall, this is just the beginning of Dobbies’ online adventures.

“Where we’re going to have to get good is helping people to shop for plants online,” he says. “The next step will be to install great big screens in the stores, encouraging every single person that shops at garden centres to give it a go.”

Having forced himself to become an online plant shopper, Marshall is convinced that, if well-executed, it will become popular.

“People will still want to come and see plants and have lunch and talk to plant experts. But I find myself now buying wild flowers online at 6am,” he confesses.

“If the fulfilment is managed in-house, the driver becomes a brand ambassador and can put the item in the right place, perhaps build it or offer advice, and then take the rubbish away with them”

Nicholas Marshall 

Further down the line, Marshall is keen to deploy additional services for online customers, explaining that “it’s not enough to just deliver and leave”.

“If the fulfilment is managed in-house, the driver becomes a brand ambassador and can put the item in the right place, perhaps build it or offer advice, and then take the rubbish away with them.

“That’s just a few of the things we can look to do,” Marshall says, with a wink that suggests he has much more up his sleeve.

The Wyevale way

Wyevale Garden Centres – the country’s largest garden centre group with 150 stores – ramped up its online capabilities in January this year.

Recognising the acceleration within the sector – and discovering that 69% of its customers have shopped online for garden products – the private equity-owned retailer launched a new mobile-optimised website.

“Trading so far has been very encouraging, for both plants and bulkier items, such as garden furniture and sheds,” Wyevale Garden Centres head of ecommerce Jim Clear tells Retail Week.

“An online offer has enabled Wyevale Garden Centres to reach a growing audience of green-fingered urban city dwellers,” he adds. 

Wyevale Garden Centres encourages customers to try the site by allowing loyalty card members to redeem points online, and then hopes to keep them coming back with advice and tips, including more than 50 videos and 130 articles.

The bricks-and-clicks paradigm

But is there another way – a way to merge digital convenience with in-store experience?

The jury is still out on whether garden centres should operate solely from stores or invest in online, so perhaps the solution is a combination of the two – seamless multichannel retailing, incorporating the increasingly popular click-and-collect.

This is the utopia Marshall has in mind.

Before it was snapped-up by the cash-rich Wesfarmers and prior to his Dobbies days, Marshall tabled a bid for Homebase with a vision of setting up click-and-collect points.

The outlets he had in mind would incorporate restaurants, a small selection of plants, changing rooms and other facilities, such as banking.

In essence, Marshall explains, they would solve many of the issues around delivery and returns, bridging the gap between traditional and online retailing.

He was pipped to the post on that occasion, but his ambition remains. “I still think it’s a cracking idea,” he admits.

If Amazon’s audacious push into bricks-and-mortar with its acquisition of Whole Foods is anything to go by, it won’t be enough in the long term to stay as a single channel retailer. The march of progress is inevitable and not even the world of garden centres is immune to change. 

“It’s fascinating to see Crocus step into the garden centre arena, and follows a trend that is being seen across retail where online-only operators are choosing to develop a physical presence too”

Andy Newman

Plants pureplay Crocus, which launched in 2000 and until recently suffered sluggish growth, has just made its first foray into bricks-and-mortar with the purchase of Dorney Court Kitchen Garden, near Windsor.

Newman, who owned Dorney Court Kitchen Garden until 2011 says: “It’s fascinating to see Crocus step into the garden centre arena, and follows a trend that is being seen across retail where online-only operators are choosing to develop a physical presence too.”

Homebase’s new owners, Wesfarmers-owned Bunnings, made its assault on the UK home improvement market last year, its initial plan was not to operate online. It has since made a U-turn, opting to launch a transactional website in the UK.

Perhaps the retail paradigm then is a sophisticated and seamless combination of the two channels.

In Marshall’s words: “Now’s the time for all of us to step up to the plate”, because, the growth shoots in multichannel garden centres are sprouting rapidly.