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Creating impactful garden centre displays is essential for attracting customers, increasing dwell time, and driving sales across seasonal ranges. As a supplier of shop fittings, retail displays, and merchandising solutions, we understand how the right combination of retail shelving, display stands, point of sale materials, and visual merchandising techniques can transform your space.
In this guide, we’ll share 10 practical tips to help garden centre retailers optimise layout, enhance product presentation, and create inspiring in-store experiences that encourage customers to explore, engage, and buy.
1. Use vertical space
Create dramatic displays that maximise the space available and the visibility of different plants. Layer taller plants behind shorter ones, or play with shapes, pairing tall, thin plants with plants that are more contained or ‘shrub like’.
Use tiered display stands for plants, with larger display pieces that create a focal point in the middle of a floor space. Employ themes on these stands, whether that’s ‘shade loving houseplants’ or ‘cottage garden favourites’.
2. Use themed feature displays
Just like fashion retail, garden centre merchandising is about storytelling at its core. This display of a branded range of bird food and accompanying products creates a complete picture of what a garden with these products could look like – complete with fake leaves and grass!
There are so many possibilities with themed display, whether you stick to seasonal themes, show entire brand ranges, a scene-scape – featuring a variety of products across ranges, or trending ideas and looks in the market.
3. Add garden centre POS signage
Another example of using vertical space to your advantage - signage is a powerful tool to support any themes you choose to use, or, as a tool to signpost customers to high-value product ranges. You can also employ poster snap frames to display care guides that encourage purchases, simple chalkboards for quick pricing updates to display offers, fun messaging that communicates your brand’s vibe, or purchase checklists to upsell customers.
4. Add unique touches
Using unique display pieces in a garden centre setting is a powerful way to capture attention, differentiate your retail space, and create a memorable shopping experience. Eye-catching features, such as a display table shown here, not only showcase products in a creative and inspiring way but also tell a story that resonates with customers.
This kind of visual merchandising taps into trends like sustainability and lifestyle-led retail, helping shoppers to imagine how products might look in their own gardens. Distinctive displays act as natural focal points, increasing dwell time and encouraging social sharing, while reinforcing your brand identity as innovative and design-led.
5. Incorporate rustic display elements
Incorporating rustic display elements such as wooden crates, metal buckets, and woven hyacinth baskets is an effective way for garden centre retailers to create an authentic, natural aesthetic that aligns perfectly with their product offering. These materials reinforce a connection to the outdoors and evoke a sense of craftsmanship, quality, and sustainability - key values for many garden centre customers.
From a visual merchandising perspective, rustic fixtures add texture, warmth, and depth to displays, helping products feel more tactile and inviting. They also offer versatile, cost-effective merchandising solutions that can be easily reconfigured for seasonal displays, promotions, or themed areas, while enhancing the overall shopping experience with a relaxed, lifestyle-led appeal.
6. Use wooden plant stands
Although these may require maintenance for outdoor displays, or if regularly exposed to damp when plants are being watered, wooden plant stands for garden centres also bring in elements of nature to your visual merchandising.
Whether you choose warm or light woods, the textured, natural material of wooden plants stands compliments your product offering. These stands also offer the opportunity to play with height and depth in your displays, in a way that is different to what consumers might be used to in traditional retail.
7. Consider how weather resistant your furniture and fittings are
Wooden display furniture or display stands will require seasonal maintenance, but equally, metal racking can be prone to rust and will also require upkeep.
Choose wooden furniture such as items in our Blue City range, that has been treated to withstand use outdoors and will only require occasional upkeep as seasons change.
First impressions are everything so ensure your space is well maintained. Consider your team’s capacity to complete the duties to upkeep the displays when making choices about the materials of your displays.
8. Embrace flexibility with easily movable display furniture
Give customers a reason to return again and again by enabling frequent product rotations and display updates.
Choose POS signage that can be swapped easily, as well as modular, adaptable shop fittings such as slatwall or gridwall. Consider ease-of-use concerns, such as how much lifting you expect staff to do, and prioritise ranges that have in-built castor wheels and are deliberately light-weight for easy manoeuvrability, such as Morplan’s Sanremo range.
9. Choose ‘heavy duty’ options where necessary
Designed less for their aesthetic, and more for their practical considerations, heavy duty warehouse racking is ideal for heavier (and potentially less aesthetic) garden tools, supplies and equipment. These can be used to unobtrusively line the walls of your space, allowing the ‘showier’ products to take centre stage. Or, in larger spaces they can be tucked away in their own separate area – leading customers on a journey from the aspirational idea of what they want their garden to be, onto the practical building blocks to achieve it.
10. Add display units that enable visual variety
Ranges like Morpan’s Frax35 mix display shelving with pegboards, grids, hanging rails and more. Display accessories and essentials alongside the relevant larger equipment products or use it to employ themes such as ‘watering’ related products.
These displays have visual variety built into them, using height and different layers to catch the eye. Plus, elements such as pegboards and grids enable for quick, frequent display changes.
Looking for more ideas?
Discover more Garden Centre inspiration here.
Or, reach out to our one of our regional store teams or telesales team members for expert advice and guidance on planning your space, choosing the right products, and looking to the future with related retail consumables and equipment!
