SEASON 5 , EPISODE 7
Glee 2025: Growing the Next Generation: Lee Connelly & Sipcam’s Nigel Thompson on Schools, Greener Gardening, and Innovation
Towards the end of our conversation with Nigel Thompson at Glee, I asked whether all the activity on the Sipcam Home & Garden stand was beginning to turn into new listings.
His answer was encouraging, but it was hardly a story of instant success. He talked about a couple of significant retailer conversations that had been going on for years. Now, finally, there were signs that some of them might turn into something.
That stayed with me because it echoed several other things Nigel had said during the interview.
Building a brand takes time. Changing attitudes towards greener gardening takes time. Developing a younger audience takes time. Even some of the work Sipcam is doing with schools is deliberately aimed at a future that will not show up neatly in next quarter’s sales.
None of that is particularly comforting if you are responsible for a marketing budget.
Most businesses quite reasonably want to know what they are getting back. Put money into an activity and somebody will eventually ask what it delivered. Sometimes the answer is easy to see: sales increased, a retailer listed the range, leads arrived, a promotion shifted stock.
But some worthwhile marketing investments do not pay back on that timetable.
The difficult question is how you tell the difference between something that needs time and something that simply is not working.
Brand building can be expensive before it becomes valuable
Nigel was refreshingly matter-of-fact about the cost of creating recognition for a challenger brand in a category where established names have been around for years.
“Creating that brand is time consuming, lengthy and expensive. Expensive on not just monetary terms, but expensive in terms of time and emotional efforts sometimes.”
That is easy to underestimate.
An established competitor benefits from years of familiarity. People recognise the products. Retailers know what they do. Customers may have seen the advertising, used the product before or watched somebody else use it. Even if they could not explain much about the brand, it already occupies some space in their memory.
A challenger does not inherit any of that.
It has to create recognition while also creating distribution, proving the products, earning retailer confidence and giving people a reason to switch from something they already know.
There is no single piece of marketing that suddenly completes that job. Recognition accumulates.
This is part of the context behind the continuing development of ecofective. The brand is trying to make greener garden care feel relevant, effective and emotionally appealing to an audience that is not necessarily the same as the traditional core garden-centre customer.
We have seen some of that at close quarters through our work with the brand. Our ecofective Brand Transformation case study shows how the positioning, personality, naming, packaging and retail communication have evolved, but Nigel’s interview makes a broader point: none of this comes with an expectation that a market will move overnight.
When Kate asked him about the tension between greener gardening and efficacy, Nigel described it as a journey. He also pointed out that Sipcam’s target consumer is younger than the core garden-centre audience they are often selling through.
You can respond to that change. You can prepare for it. You can make the brand more relevant to the people you believe are coming into the category.
What you cannot do is demand that they arrive faster because you have finished the marketing plan.
Waiting does not mean standing still
This is where patience can become a dangerous word.
It is easy to defend disappointing results by saying brand building takes time. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is an excuse.
If the final commercial result is going to take longer to arrive, you need other evidence that the investment is moving in the right direction.
Nigel’s interview contained quite a lot of that kind of evidence.
He said conversations about greener gardening were becoming easier. Retailers understood the subject better than they had a few years earlier. Nourish & Bloom, launched at Glee, was getting positive reactions from buyers and from the consumers Sipcam was deliberately asking for feedback. Several long-running retailer conversations appeared to be moving closer to a decision.
None of those things is the same as sustained sales.
But they are useful signals.
If you are investing ahead of the final result, it helps to decide what progress should look like along the way. That could be growing distribution, stronger buyer reactions, higher consideration, improving awareness, more people engaging with the category, repeat purchase, increasing retailer support or simply finding that a conversation that used to require ten minutes of explanation now takes two.
The right measures will depend on what you are trying to change.
The important part is not to confuse patience with passivity. You keep looking at what is happening, learn from the response and adjust.
Nigel described Sipcam’s position as a challenger in much the same way. Rather than defending a dominant market share, the business can sometimes “roll the dice”, see what happens, then amend or adjust.
That is a useful distinction. Long-term thinking does not require stubbornly doing the same thing for a long time.
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Some investments are aimed beyond the next sale
The longest-term example in the interview had almost nothing to do with selling product.
In 2025, ecofective partnered with Lee Connelly on a schools programme designed to get children gardening. Fifteen schools were visited in person and another fifteen were involved remotely. Members of the Sipcam team went into schools themselves to plant wildflower seeds with children.
When I asked Nigel what the brand got from doing it, he was very clear about what was not driving the activity.
“The driver isn’t about a material monetary fiscal return for ecofective. It is about how can this help our beloved industry.”
That is an unusually long horizon for a marketing conversation.
A child planting wildflowers at primary school is unlikely to head home and add a garden-care range to the weekly shop. Some may lose interest in gardening entirely for the next ten or fifteen years.
So why would a commercial business put money and staff time into it?
Partly because industries need future customers. Gardening has spent years discussing how to attract younger people, but somebody has to create the first positive experiences that make gardening feel relevant to them.
There is also a sensible brand connection. Ecofective talks about products that are safe around children and pets and about a more considerate way to garden. Supporting children to grow things is not an arbitrary cause attached to the side of the brand.
But I think the more interesting point is that not every investment needs to be squeezed into an immediate sales calculation to be commercially defensible.
There are times when a business can reasonably decide that helping create the future of a category is valuable, even though attribution will be impossible.
That does require conviction. It is much easier to sign off something when the spreadsheet promises a return by the end of the quarter.
Retail relationships have their own timetable
The same tension appears in a more obviously commercial form with retailers.
Nigel talked about conversations that can take years before anything happens. Anyone who sells through retail will recognise that. A buyer may like the idea but have no space. The range review may be months away. Another supplier may still be under contract. The timing may simply be wrong.
That creates an awkward marketing problem because a long period without a listing can look very similar to failure.
The temptation is either to keep chasing the same conversation without changing anything, or to abandon it too quickly.
Neither is particularly useful.
A better question is whether the reasons for the retailer to say yes are becoming stronger.
Has the product improved? Is the proposition easier to understand? Is there stronger evidence of consumer demand? Has the brand become better known? Can you offer a clearer sell-through plan? Has the market moved closer to the problem you solve?
Sometimes persistence works because time has passed. More often, time has allowed the case to evolve and become better.
That seems to be part of what Nigel was describing at Glee. Sipcam has been talking about greener gardening for some time. The subject is now easier for retailers to engage with, and some long-running conversations are becoming more productive.
The years matter, but so does what happened during them.
Long term should still have a direction
Marketing teams are under pressure to demonstrate value, and rightly so. Long-term brand building should not become a hiding place for activity nobody can evaluate.
But the opposite can be just as damaging.
If every decision has to justify itself through an immediate, directly attributable return, businesses will naturally favour the things that are easiest to measure. Promotions. Short-term sales activity. Performance media. Projects with a visible beginning and end.
Those things can be useful. They just do different jobs.
Creating recognition, changing perceptions, developing a new audience, earning retailer confidence or helping a category remain relevant may require a longer view.
The discipline is to be clear about what you are investing in, why you believe it will matter and what evidence you expect to see before the final return arrives.
If that evidence never appears, patience should eventually give way to a different decision.
If it does appear, the fact that the commercial result is taking time is not necessarily a reason to stop.
Know what you are prepared to wait for
Nigel finished our conversation by saying that gardening is not for the faint-hearted, or for people who love the predictable.
He was talking partly about weather, seasons and the uncertainty every garden business lives with. But it feels like a reasonable description of marketing too.
Some investments will give you a quick, measurable result. Others will create conditions that make future results more likely.
A useful marketing plan probably needs both.
So before dismissing something because the return is not immediate, it may be worth asking a different set of questions.
What are we actually trying to change? How long might that reasonably take What would tell us we are making progress? And what evidence would tell us it is time to stop?
Not every good marketing investment pays back quickly.
But if you are going to wait, you should know what you are waiting for.
This article was inspired by our conversation with Nigel Thompson from Sipcam Home & Garden, recorded for The Underground Podcast at Glee 2025. Nigel talked about greener gardening, challenger-brand growth, brand building, the ecofective schools programme and retailer relationships that can take years to develop.