Launch of The Greatest Awards 2013
New award celebrates 100 years of the Chelsea Flower Show
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With poor weather in successive seasons underlining more strongly than ever the need for creative input to boost plant sales, GTN announces a brand new award to find the garden centre planterias with the Midas touch.
Since their launch by GTN in 2006, The Greatest Awards have been recognising and rewarding team excellence in garden centre retailing across all the major departments.
This year, recognising that garden centres must maintain a tight focus on essential business targets to mitigate recent losses, The Greatest Awards will initially feature the planteria, the category that gives garden centres their unique competitive edge.
After another poor spring for plant sales, centres are anxious to maximise planteria turnover in June and July, way beyond the traditional cut-off point for the summer bedding season. This summer, there is a heaven-sent theme to inspire planteria managers and their merchandising teams – 2013 is the centenary year of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, whose medal-winning plants and show gardens will continue to excite the gardening public throughout the rest of the year.
GTN and sponsors Bord na Mona are now inviting garden centres to take part in The Greatest Planterias Award 2013, a nationwide competition to encourage the creation of exciting and innovative plant displays that will stimulate footfall and boost customer spend.
The competition is in two parts:
1. The Greatest Planteria Displays celebrating 100 years of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show – using all your skills and ingenuity to produce beautiful, fun-filled planteria theatre - with sales appeal. As last year’s Greatest Jubilee Doorstep promotions proved, displays of this kind guarantee an immediate increase in plant sales.
Garden centres should send photos of their displays to us by Wednesday 15 July 2013. The winners will be selected by an expert Greatest Awards judging panel and notified of their success later in July, giving them ample opportunity for marketing and PR activity during the summer and through the autumn sales period.
2. The Greatest Planteria Sales Teams - as voted by the public. GTN will provide, on application, PDFs of posters, voting forms and other POS you can use to get your customers involved in voting your Planteria team as The Greatest. Part of the voting process involves your customers giving feedback as to why your team is The Greatest, which always proves a great motivator to planteria staff.
The public vote for The Greatest Planteria Sales Team will also close on 15 July and the winners notified later in the month.
For both of these Greatest Awards categories there will be awards for different sizes of garden centre, so every Planteria Sales team has a chance of winning, they just have to be Great at what they do. To register your Planteria Team for The Greatest Planetria Awards follow this link: Register here
Garden centres who took part in The Greatest Jubilee Doorstep Challenge know just how much their special displays helped to increase plant sales in the challenging trading conditions of summer 2012.
At our Gold Award centre, Van Hage at Great Amwell, their excellent Jubilee dressing was evident from the car park through to the spa baths display and resulted in sales of Jubilee items that far exceeded expectations.
Centres can use their participation to develop useful community networking and even create their own customer competition, like finalists Barton Grange at Brock, who got 42 local schools involved last year.
At Busy Bee in the Isle of Wight, in the section to find the customer with The Greatest Jubilee Doorstep Display, Linda Ryan of Sandown created a bright, vibrant jubilee doorstep that also included the Olympics – a great way to welcome visitors and brighten up her street.
Even the smallest centres enjoyed success last year. Our Silver Award went to the bijou Cleeve Nursery. Other finalists included Cowells, Coolings, and Van Hage Peterborough.
Here's a collection of pictures from last year's The Greatest Awards
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