SEASON 5 , EPISODE 6
Glee 2025: Live Q&A with Blue Diamond’s Alan Roper
At Glee, Alan Roper said something that should probably make every small product supplier feel both encouraged and slightly uncomfortable
He was talking about the suppliers Blue Diamond looks for at the show. The big established companies are easy enough to find. Alan is more interested in the smaller stands, the niche businesses and the products his category managers might otherwise walk past.
“Sometimes just one product can be a profit bomb, as I call it.”
It is a great phrase because it describes something more useful than novelty.
A product can be new without changing very much. It can look different, have an improved feature or arrive with a good story and still end up competing for exactly the same spend as everything already on the shelf.
A profit bomb does something more commercially interesting. It gives customers a new reason to spend and gives the retailer a source of profit they did not have before.
That distinction came up several times during our conversations with Alan, Managing Director of Blue Diamond Garden Centres. He talks a lot about point of difference, but never as an abstract branding exercise. For him, difference earns its keep when it creates growth.
Different enough to do what?
Point of difference is one of those phrases everyone in marketing agrees with.
Nobody writes a product brief asking for something indistinguishable from the competition. We all want an advantage, a distinctive feature, a better claim or a proposition that helps the product stand apart.
The harder question is what that difference actually changes.
Does it persuade someone to switch from the market leader? Does it encourage an existing customer to trade up? Does it solve a problem people currently put up with? Does it attract somebody who was not previously buying the category? Or does it create an additional purchase that simply did not exist before?
Those are all valid forms of growth, but they tell very different commercial stories.
Alan gave a simple example from outdoor lighting. He had seen a rechargeable bulb that could be attached to an outdoor lamp. His interest was not that somebody had invented a slightly nicer bulb. It created a new way for customers to use outdoor lighting and, in his words, a whole new profit centre.
He then compared it with pergolas. Blue Diamond had developed a pergola market that Alan said was producing around £2 million of profit that the business had not had two years earlier.
That is what he means by “new money”.
Customers were not simply choosing one existing pergola brand instead of another from a mature fixture. The category itself had created another reason to spend.
Retailers are not buying innovation for its own sake
This changes how I think product brands should talk about innovation.
Inside a business, innovation can become heavily focused on the product itself. Months are spent on formulations, materials, manufacturing, features, technical performance and all the things required to get something genuinely new out of the door.
That work is essential. But a retailer is looking at the same innovation through a different lens.
They already have products. They already have suppliers. They already have finite space, stock budgets and customers whose attention is being competed for across the whole store.
So, the commercial question is not simply whether your new product is good. It is whether making room for it creates an opportunity worth having.
That may be incremental sales. It may be better margin. It may create a reason for a customer to visit, allow the retailer to reach a different audience or give the category a point of difference that competitors down the road do not have.
But there needs to be some consequence to the difference.
Alan is very clear about this from the retailer side. He once replaced Gardman with seven separate suppliers because he was frustrated by the lack of point of difference. He wanted more variety and more reasons for customers to see something they couldn’t get everywhere else.
That is a useful reminder for any supplier whose pitch starts with the size of its range.
Sometimes the retailer is not looking for another supplier that can fill twenty bays. One genuinely desirable product can be more valuable than a catalogue of competent ones.
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Small suppliers may have an advantage
That is probably the most encouraging part of Alan’s argument.
You might assume the country’s largest garden centre group would naturally favour the biggest suppliers. They have the infrastructure, field teams, marketing budgets and supply capability to serve a large estate.
Alan says almost the opposite.
The big suppliers have an important role, but he actively tells category managers to stop spending all their time with them and look at smaller businesses. He wants more niche suppliers at Glee because that is where he expects to find some of the new products that can move the growth needle.
Scale, in other words, is not the only source of commercial value.
A smaller supplier can be more focused. It can bring an idea the established businesses have ignored, serve a narrow need particularly well or move quickly enough to establish a new opportunity before the category becomes crowded.
But there is a challenge hidden inside that opportunity.
Being small is not a proposition. Being independent is not a proposition. Even being innovative is not automatically a proposition.
The retailer still needs to see why customers will want what you have created and where the commercial upside comes from.
That is why I like “profit bomb” so much. It brings the conversation back from the romance of being the plucky challenger to the reality of retail.
Desirability has to come before the spreadsheet
There is a danger, of course, in making this argument too financial.
A product does not become commercially attractive simply because a spreadsheet predicts an impressive rate of sale.
Customers have to want it.
That may sound obvious, but new-product planning can quickly become dominated by market sizes, margins, price points and retailer targets. All useful information, none of which creates desire by itself.
Alan’s examples work because you can see the customer appeal as well as the commercial logic. A rechargeable outdoor lamp creates a useful new possibility. A pergola changes what someone can do with their outdoor space.
The product gives the customer something worth wanting before it gives the retailer something worth ranging.
This is where brand, product and commercial thinking need to meet.
A real point of difference is not just a claim you can put on the packaging. It should help somebody understand why this product deserves their attention, why it feels relevant to them and why it might be worth spending money they had not planned to spend.
The commercial case then explains why that customer response is valuable to the retailer.
New money is not the only good money
I would not take Alan’s argument to mean every new product needs to invent a category.
Most won’t, and trying too hard to claim category creation can result in inflated language around products that are really sensible improvements on what already exists.
There is nothing wrong with taking market share.
There is nothing wrong with creating a better version of an existing product, giving customers a reason to trade up or giving a retailer a more profitable alternative to something already ranged.
Sometimes a replacement product is exactly what the market needs.
The useful discipline is being honest about where you expect the growth to come from.
If you are asking a buyer to replace an established line, can you show why customers will switch?
If you are asking for more space, what additional sales should that space generate?
If you are charging more, what makes the trade-up desirable?
If you believe the product will recruit new customers, what makes that audience different and why has the existing category failed to attract them?
And if you really are creating new money, what is the new need, occasion or behaviour that makes the additional spend plausible?
Those questions make the innovation story more difficult, but they also make it much more useful.
A buyer needs to see the opportunity quickly
There is another implication for marketing.
If the commercial value of a product depends on somebody understanding a new use, a different audience or an unfamiliar source of growth, that opportunity needs to be communicated very clearly.
The inventor or product manager may have spent years arriving at the idea. The buyer has considerably less time to work out what it means for their business.
Saying a product is innovative is not enough. Neither is producing a long list of features and expecting the commercial story to emerge by itself.
You need to connect the product idea to the customer behaviour you think it can create.
Who buys it? Why now? What does it let them do that they cannot currently do, or do as well? Is the spend additional or is it replacing something else? What evidence supports that? And what will help it sell once it reaches the store?
That is the point where innovation becomes a retail proposition rather than simply a product launch.
Sometimes one product is enough
There is a tendency for smaller suppliers to feel they have to look bigger than they are.
They broaden the range, add variants and try to demonstrate that they can offer the retailer everything a larger competitor can.
Alan’s comments suggest there may be another route.
Do not try to beat the big suppliers at being big.
Give the retailer something they do not already have.
That could be a new product, a new occasion, a more desirable solution, a category idea or simply one exceptionally good answer to an overlooked customer problem.
If that product creates demand, offers a useful point of difference and gives the retailer a credible opportunity to make additional profit, its small supplier may suddenly look much more interesting.
The phrase “profit bomb” is deliberately colourful, but the thinking behind it is quite disciplined.
Different is not enough.
Innovative is not enough.
Commercially convincing is not enough if nobody actually wants the product.
The interesting products are the ones where distinctiveness, desirability and commercial value reinforce one another.
When that happens, a buyer is not simply being asked to make room for another SKU.
They are being shown somewhere new for growth to come from.
This article was inspired by two conversations with Alan Roper, Managing Director of Blue Diamond Garden Centres, recorded for The Underground Podcast. In a live Q&A at Glee 2025, Alan talked about innovation, smaller suppliers, point of difference and the products he describes as “profit bombs”. In a separate interview, he also discussed why new suppliers and products matter to the continued growth of the garden-centre offer.