Ahead of Christmas openings on a big scale, September garden centre sales are heading towards being over 20% up on last year. After the first three weeks of the month the GTN Bestsellers All Products volume sales index sits at just 1% below last year’s September total.
The big increases are for core gardening activity. Growing media continues to sell through at record levels. Garden products, especially lawn care, plant feeds, weedkillers, pest control, pots and pot feet, are all significantly up in volume sales. Autumn Veg-2-Gro lines are outselling previous years’ levels, all be it not quite at the same increases we saw during the summer. And plant sales are at staggeringly high levels for the month.
In the GTN Bestsellers weekly garden centre Epos data we can see that Christmas sales are running about one week ahead of last year, so it will be interesting to see if the colder weather forecast for this weekend, and wider Christmas openings, speeds up those sales too.
An average weekly year on year increase in sales volumes of 40% would get the GTN Bestsellers Sales index back to parity year on year, even after seven weeks of zero sales during the lockdown closure. After the sales we have seen since re-opening and the ‘we feel safer in garden centres’ goodwill there appears to be out there, who knows what could be possible?
Perhaps this weekend will be a good indicator after the announcement of tighter measures and the weather turning more autumnal. Watch this space for next week’s GTN Bestsellers analysis.
We hope you enjoyed our coverage of the Glee Gathering and the Glee New Product Awards in Glee Daily News. One thing it highlighted to us is the incredible value we all get from a live trade show event. Fingers crossed we’ll all be able to be back at the NEC next September. See you there!
GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year: week 38
• Garden Products Top 50 – up 27%
• Growing Media Top 50 – up 44%
• Wild Bird Care Top 50 – down 11%
• Veg 2 Gro Top 50 – up 22%
GTN Bestsellers All Sales volumes compared to the same week last year: week 38
• All Plants with Barcode index – up 48%
• All Items with Barcode index – up 28%
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