“Garden centres are taking their eye off their core business”

Garden centres are losing market share because they are concentrating on “sexy” ranges instead of their core business. John Ashley, head of marketing at Scotts, the supplier of garden care products, addressed the industry in Britain with this theory at Glee. He said that businesses on High Street outlets and DIY superstores in particular have profited from the growth of the fertiliser and plant protection market, which GfK calculates to have grown by 6.2 per cent to £ 103 mio (€ 147 mio). High Street outlets have increased their sales by nearly twelve per cent, but garden centres by only four per cent. Mr Ashley considers that the attitude of garden centres towards ordering stock is responsible for this difference. He claims that they are increasingly going for seasonal business, scaling down the warehousing side and consequently frustrating impulse purchases in the slack months from January to March.