One of the things Peter Burks always notices at Glee is not necessarily the product itself, but how it is being presented.
He talked about exhibitors showing retailers how a product might work on the shop floor: how it can be merchandised, how the customer can pick it out, and how a complicated category can be made easier to navigate.
His example was garden chemicals. Faced with a long run of boxes, bottles and treatments, how does somebody know which one is right for them? Which product is going to make itself understood quickly enough to be chosen?
That question became more interesting as our conversation moved on.
Peter, Chief Executive of the Garden Centre Association, was talking about rising labour costs and the pressure that is putting on staffing levels. Garden centres have traditionally differentiated themselves through service and advice. If there are fewer people available on the shop floor, the people who remain need to know more. And the products themselves have to work harder to help customers make the right choice.
That creates a challenge for product brands too.
There can be an extraordinary amount of knowledge sitting behind a garden product. Horticultural scientists, technical development teams and product developers may have spent years understanding how something works and why it performs. I’ve seen first-hand the R&D and controlled trials brands must go to in developing their products. But if that knowledge stops somewhere between the manufacturer and the aisle, the customer never gets the benefit of it.
A technically good product can still be difficult to buy
Garden categories are full of products where successful use depends on understanding something.
Feeds, fertilisers, growing media, lawn treatments, pest controls and plant-care products can all involve choices about timing, application, dosage, conditions or the particular problem someone is trying to solve.
That does not mean the customer wants a horticulture lesson before they buy.
In fact, that is part of the difficulty.
The people behind the product may know ten things that are scientifically important. The shopper may need one thing that helps them choose confidently and another two that help them use it properly.
The marketing job is not to transfer all the knowledge. It is to decide which knowledge is useful at each stage.
Peter described the educational side of merchandising as one of the things he particularly values at Glee. He mentioned examples where the presentation helps a retailer, and ultimately the shopper, pick out a particular product rather than simply confronting them with another wall of packaging.
That sounds simple, but it asks quite a lot of the brand.
You have to understand the customer well enough to know what they are trying to decide. You have to understand the product well enough to simplify it without losing what makes it valuable. And you have to be disciplined enough not to fill the available space with everything the technical team knows.
The knowledge gap becomes more expensive when there are fewer staff
Peter’s concern about staffing gives this issue a harder commercial edge.
He talked about wage and National Insurance increases putting significant pressure on garden-centre profitability and, in some cases, reducing the number of people available on the shop floor.
For a sector that has long prided itself on knowledgeable service, that creates an uncomfortable tension. Customers still need help, but there may be fewer people around to give it.
“If we’re going to see less staff on the shop floor in a garden centre, those staff need to know more.”
I think there is a second half to that thought.
The products and the communication around them need to do more as well.
Good packaging cannot replace a knowledgeable person. Neither can a shelf-edge message, a QR code or a short film. But they can answer the questions that do not need a person, which leaves staff more time for the questions that genuinely benefit from experience and conversation.
That feels especially important in complex categories. If every basic product choice requires a member of staff, the system is putting pressure in the wrong place.
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The science is only valuable if somebody can use it
Peter made a point during the interview that I think product brands should pay attention to.
“The producers have put in a lot of effort. There’s a lot of science going into producing their product. But that information I don’t think is getting to the shop floor.”
There is something slightly frustrating about that.
A manufacturer can invest heavily in research, trials, formulation and technical proof, then treat the communication of that expertise as the last five per cent of the project.
But from the customer’s point of view, the information may be the thing that makes the investment useful.
A better formulation is valuable if the customer understands why it is better. A different way of watering is useful if someone knows they need to change what they do. A technical advantage matters commercially when it becomes a reason to choose, a reason to trust or a reason to get a better result.
That does not mean turning every piece of POS into a science poster.
Quite the opposite. The more expertise sits behind the product, the more judgement is needed to decide what the customer actually needs to know.
This is one of the places where brand and technical teams can easily talk past each other. The technical team understandably wants accuracy and completeness. Marketing wants clarity. The answer is not to choose one over the other. It is to use the technical knowledge to create communication that is both true and useful.
Brands cannot assume the retailer will do the translation
When I asked Peter whether this was partly a supplier responsibility, he described what he called a two-pronged approach.
Brands need to make more effort to get the information through, whether that is through better point of sale, reps talking to buyers or other forms of training. Retailers then need to make sure that knowledge reaches the people who are actually speaking to customers.
That sounds obvious until you think about how many places the chain can break.
The supplier creates the material but it never leaves the buyer’s inbox. The rep explains the product to one person but the information never reaches the wider team. POS is supplied but stays in the stockroom. A training module exists but nobody has time to complete it. The packaging carries the message, but it assumes knowledge the shopper does not have.
Each part can technically have been done while the customer still ends up standing in front of the fixture unsure what to buy.
That is why I think product brands need to think beyond producing information and ask whether the information is actually travelling.
Who needs to understand this? At what point? In what format? What is likely to get lost? And what can we do to make it easier for the retailer to pass the knowledge on?
Education is part of the sell-through plan
This also changes how I think about retail support.
Brands understandably concentrate a lot of attention on winning the listing. The sell-in presentation explains the product, the opportunity and the commercial case. Samples are demonstrated. The buyer asks questions. Everyone leaves the room knowing considerably more than they did at the start.
Then the product arrives in store and meets people who were not in the room.
That is where the second communication job begins.
The customer does not have access to the original presentation. The weekend employee may never have met the supplier rep. The store manager may be responsible for thousands of lines. If a new product needs explanation, somebody has to decide how that explanation will survive after the buyer meeting.
Peter talked about the GCA’s Grow e-learning platform, which at the time of our interview contained 98 courses across horticultural and compliance subjects. His wider ambition was clear: better education for shop-floor teams, so the people serving customers are better equipped to help them succeed.
For suppliers, that should make training and educational content part of the launch plan rather than an optional extra.
The precise answer will depend on the product. It might be a two-minute training film, a one-page staff guide, a short demonstration, a shelf message, a comparison chart or something built into the packaging itself.
The format is less important than the question behind it: what does somebody need to know to sell this product confidently, and what does the customer need to know to use it successfully?
More information is not the same as better information
There is a danger in all this.
Once we decide customers need more education, the instinct can be to give them more information.
That can make things worse.
A wall of technical claims is still a wall. A shelf full of QR codes does not automatically create clarity. A training portal nobody uses is just another place where knowledge can sit.
The better objective is not maximum information. It is minimum confusion.
Peter’s merchandising example gets back to that. In a complicated run of garden-care products, the job is to help someone identify the product that is right for their problem. If the customer can do that quickly, the technical depth behind the product becomes reassuring rather than overwhelming.
The same principle applies after purchase. Give people the advice that improves their chance of success. If there is more detail they may need later, make it easy to find.
That hierarchy matters because getting the product right is only part of the job. Helping people choose and use it properly is part of the product experience too.
The expertise needs to make the whole journey
Peter finished our Glee conversation by saying that, if he could change one thing in the industry over the next five years, he would put it somewhere around education, particularly educating shop-floor teams.
I can see why.
Garden retail sells expertise-heavy products into a world where customers often want simple answers. At the same time, retailers are under pressure to run efficiently and cannot assume there will always be a knowledgeable person standing next to every fixture.
That makes the flow of knowledge between supplier, retailer, staff and customer more commercially important, not less.
For product brands, the challenge is not simply to know more.
It is to turn what you know into something a buyer can understand, a member of staff can remember and a customer can use.
Because if years of product expertise stop before they reach the person making the decision, it is worth asking how much of that expertise is actually doing its job.
This article was inspired by our conversation with Peter Burks, Chief Executive of the Garden Centre Association, recorded for The Underground Podcast at Glee 2025. Peter talked about merchandising, educational point of sale, staffing pressures, shop-floor knowledge and the need for suppliers and retailers to work together to get useful product information through to customers.