The immediate focus for the Scotts-Solus brands is on providing great levels of service to their customers, revealed Martin Breddy, Vice President and General Manager of The Scotts Company (UK) Ltd.

GTN Xtra spoke to Martin at the GIMA Awards, two days after the Scotts-Solus deal was announced.

First, we asked Martin how negotiations to buy the Solus brands were revived after Scotts had pulled out of a possible deal in April?
When Solus went into administration it was the start of the season so our instinct then was to focus firmly on delivering our products and services to our customers, and it has worked as we’re seeing double-digit growth after a couple of bad seasons. It proves that when you have a good season people are still in love with gardening which is important for all of us. In due course the administrators contacted us and that’s when we picked up the process again. There was a very intense period of activity but in the end that was a good process, well managed by the administrators. There was a lot of effort and co-operation on both sides and therefore it was a reasonably quick process in the grand scheme of things.

Was expansion always on the cards for Scotts?
If you look at what’s happening with the company in America, there has always been a desire to expand into adjacent categories. There’s no hard and fast rule but if the right opportunity arises that allows us to be consistent with our strategy then we’ll look very seriously at that. It’s not a requirement as such but it is part of our strategy to explore opportunities.

Have some of the Scotts-Solus brands suffered over the past few months?
It has been a slightly difficult period but I’m very confident that the consumer equity in those brands is still intact and in good shape. Our job is to make them stronger and healthier. The most important thing and the immediate priority is to win support through great support to our retailers. We will be focussing on providing a great service. We know the products are good and it takes a long time to diminish a brand like Yeoman. What we have to do is to restore confidence in the levels of service.

How is the distribution of Scotts products going to work in future?
We’re certainly not going to exclude our other distributor partners – they are very important and we’ll continue to work with them. For the rest of this season and next season we are going to run our depot at Doncaster for the distribution of Scotts products, and the one in the West Midlands for the Scotts-Solus brands. We believe this approach will deliver good service to our customers.

What are stock levels like at the moment?
As in any other businesses at the end of July I’m sure there’s the odd gap but it’s less critical now. The important thing is that we make sure we get ready for autumn and we make sure we’ve got enough stock to fill the pipeline for 2015. If there’s one consequence of this, it’s that there won’t be too much product innovation for 2015 because we can’t turn on a sixpence. But I don’t think that’s a problem because sometimes companies can spend too much time focusing on producing new toys instead of concentrating on the good sellers. There are some good products in this company and we’ll be making sure that the stock for those big sellers is available.

What’s been the reaction to Scotts taking over the Solus brands?
I think people are pleased to have a bit of clarity and a bit of certainty. It’s good for everyone – it’s good for our customers, it’s good for us, and it’s good for people in the Solus business who are still there.

Why didn't you buy the third-party distribution part of the Solus business?
It was an inevitable consequence of what happened in administration. It was very clear there wasn’t a common position that all other third parties were taking during administration and it became very difficult for us to understand where that piece of the business was positioned. The only certain bit was that if we took the Solus brands we knew exactly what we were getting. It fitted perfectly into our strategy of building consumer brands. 

The full interview of the Martin Breddy interview will be published in the August issue of Garden Trade News