It may have been wet and windy, but that doesn’t appear to have dented garden centre footfall.

Clearance events of Christmas lines have sold through in high volumes to push week 1 volumes in the GTN Bestsellers Epos data up 34% on the first week of 2013, and make it the highest total volume first week during the last six years that we’ve been collating Epos data.

See the back page for increases also in Garden Product and Growing Media sales as the New Year kicks off in style.

As last year ended, GTN Bestsellers data for December showed overall sales volumes up 14%. The Top 50 Garden Products sales volumes were up 11% in December, while the Top 50 Christmas products sales volumes were down 5%.

Our take on all of that is that overall sales were up because footfalls were higher than last year. Gardening, catering and gift sales have benefitted and we expect total volume sales of Christmas were up on last year but spread across an even larger number of products – the number we have on our Epos data is mind blowing!

GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year:

• Garden Products – up 53%
• Veg 2 Gro – down 17%
• Growing Media – up 4%
• All items index – up 34%

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