Garden centres, five years from now: What your peers hope will change

How can we attract more young people into the garden sector?

If you take nothing else from the episode, take this: almost everyone talked about younger people. From British Garden Centres to Woodlodge, Empathy, Sipcam and children’s gardening advocates, the message was the same. We need more young faces in our garden centres and in our teams: children, teenagers, students and adults in their twenties and thirties who don’t yet see themselves as “proper gardeners”.

What struck me was how often this was framed as both a commercial and a social opportunity. Younger customers are the future core of spend, not a side project. At the same time, guests talked about mental health, social connection and the simple lift that comes from “seeing some greenery” when life is busy and complicated.

The question is not whether young people matter. It is whether our current formats really invite them in. Many garden centres still feel designed for confident, experienced gardeners. If you already know your way round a plant area, that’s fine. If you’re a first-time balcony owner with a tiny budget, or a parent trying to entertain children for a couple of hours, it can feel much less intuitive.

Which brings me to the point several guests made in different ways: if you start by connecting with children at school age, you’re not just “doing a good thing”, you’re opening the door to families.

Keeping your core customers, while widening the circle

No sensible garden centre is going to walk away from its core demographic. For many businesses, older loyal customers are the backbone of turnover. They come often, they buy seasonally and they value expertise.

The challenge, then, is not replacement. It is addition. From a marketing and experience point of view, that means asking “and as well as?” rather than “instead of?”. For example:

• Can your existing events calendar make space for a small number of youth-focused sessions, rather than trying to reinvent everything?
• Can you revise a few key pieces of signage and merchandising so that a nervous first-timer can work out what to do without feeling foolish?
• Can you give your team simple scripts and tools that help them translate horticultural knowledge into plain language quickly, without dumbing it down?

None of this undermines your existing customers. If anything, it protects them. The sector needs a pipeline of new gardeners who are confident enough to keep visiting, keep learning and eventually become those experienced, higher-spending visitors.

It is also worth noting that younger people are not only future customers. They are future colleagues. Several guests talked about education, funded training and clear development pathways as an area where the industry has ground to make up.

That matters commercially. If your proposition rests on knowledgeable, approachable staff, then the absence of a skills pipeline is not just an HR issue, it is a strategic risk.

When technology simply helps customers choose well

Technology was another strong thread through the Glee conversations, but the nuance here is important.

Meg Warren-Davis from the YPHA talked about being open to change and “seeing what you can do with technology”, not for its own sake, but to find different ways of selling, reducing costs and improving margins. Her advice was to “look to the tech industry… look at all these other different industries and really try and take what they’re doing and apply it to your own business in some way.”

That, to me, is a useful framing for garden retail. We do not need to mimic other sectors. We can, however, learn from them.

There are already good examples in the market. Systems like Joy of Plants give customers clear, accessible information about soil, light, aspect and aftercare, either on a phone or via touchscreens in store. They help someone standing in front of a bench to answer the questions: “Will this work in my garden? Will it cope on my balcony? Am I about to waste this money?”

We also heard a strong case for AI as a practical tool rather than a buzzword. Vanessa Cranford talked about using AI to pull together local data – soil type, climate, position of the sun – into recommendations that help time-poor, budget-conscious gardeners make better choices.

That future is not hypothetical. Brands like Empathy are already experimenting with AI assistants such as Emily: tools that help gardeners navigate soil health, biofertilisers and product choices, while still signposting back to human expertise where it really counts.

The pattern here is clear:

• Start with a real customer problem: confusion, lack of confidence, fear of wasting money.
• Use technology to remove friction and support decision-making at that moment.
• Keep people and plant knowledge at the centre, with AI and digital as amplifiers, not replacements.

If we borrow that mindset from other sectors, the tech conversation in garden retail becomes much less daunting and much more useful.

Schools, community hubs and reasons to feel optimistic

One area where garden centres have a natural advantage over many other retailers is their potential as community hubs.

Dave Walker from Birleymoor Garden Centre spoke about the economic and social value of independents, and the risk of losing that “community bit” if we do not support them properly. Others highlighted how every pound invested in community engagement can multiply in local economic benefit. We see that play out whenever a garden centre or garden care brand commits seriously to schools.

We’ve been working with a garden care client that doesn’t just write a cheque for school gardening initiatives; their team turns up as well. Colleagues have taken time out to help children plant, dig and learn. One of them told us those days were “the best days I’ve spent at work all year”. That is a powerful outcome: not just for the children, but for the culture of the business.

For garden centres, the canvas is even bigger. There are opportunities to:

• Invite schools to use the centre as an outdoor classroom
• Co-create simple, seasonal projects that families can continue at home
• Follow up with content and offers that make it easy for parents to repeat the experience

Do those things consistently and you become more than a place to buy compost and have lunch. You become part of how local families mark the seasons, unwind at weekends and introduce their children to nature.

When I look across the conversations in this episode, that is what gives me confidence. Yes, the sector has work to do on skills, on sustainability, on digital. But it already has the raw materials so many other industries envy: purpose, place and a genuine role in people’s wellbeing.

Smiling towards the next five years

Towards the end of the episode, consultant Paul Pleydell offered a deceptively simple wish for the next five years: more smiling. His view was that if everyone in the sector is smiling, things are probably going well. It raised a laugh in the booth, but it stuck with me.

Smiling is not a strategy, but it can be a signal. If we can look five years ahead and imagine:

• More young people and families feeling at home in our centres
• Staff who are proud of the work they do and the impact they have
• Technology making life easier for customers and colleagues, rather than getting in the way
• Stronger roots in local schools and communities

…then there are plenty of reasons to be positive.

The conversations at Glee this year felt realistic, but hopeful. People are honest about the pressures, yet hungry to try new ideas. If we can harness that appetite – for younger audiences, for smarter tools, for deeper community connections – then the next five years for garden retail needn’t be something to fear. They can be something to look forward to.

And if, in the process, we manage to get a few more genuine smiles that might be one of the most useful metrics of progress we have.