Few marketers wear their politics as openly as Alan Roper. Stand managing director of Blue Diamond, the UK’s leading garden center group, with 54 destinations across Britain and the Channel Islands, in front of the microphone and the simple charm of the West Country gives way to something more specific.
In recent weeks Roper has gone on record to say that successive increases in the minimum wage, imposed on top of national insurance for top employers, have taken £12.6m from Blue Diamond’s bottom line, money, he says, that could have been reinvested in stores, suppliers and people.
“I’m not against minimum wage,” he insisted in more than one of his top offices. “But you have to realize that before Labour, it was the Conservatives who increased it by 10 per cent for two years in a row. Then Labor came in with another 6.7 per cent, and a 3.5 per cent increase in employers’ NI. That’s a big deal. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen a pub recently because of these costs. Sometimes I wonder if politicians have any influence on this.”
A figure of £12.6m, he is in the throes of strain, not back of the envelope. Blue Diamond averages profits for each employee on the team and Roper can track the number accurately. It also reflects his choice as an employer. “It’s not just low-income people. My colleagues who were earning a pound or fifteen more than that, as an honest employer, I chose to keep that gap. If their salary goes up, the salaries of the department managers go up. That’s where the 12.6 million comes from. I wish it would have happened in eight years, rather it happened in three years.”
The result has been a quiet, merciless review of full-time equivalent hours, first across the garden sales floor and now in restaurants. “We benchmarked the most efficient centers against others and got everyone working on the same page in terms of hours employed per day,” he said. “Restaurants are inherently tricky because we won’t compromise on service. But we’ve reduced hours of operation, and we’re not the only retailer doing it.”
He doubts those who say artificial intelligence will close the gap. “In this way I don’t think AI will have a big impact on reducing human hours. Although I’m experimenting with a full-sized salesperson avatar in one of our facilities this year, I saw one at the Retail Tech Show in London and thought, that’s novel, give it a try.”
Such pragmatism has guided 27 years of growth at Blue Diamond, which has now completed its fifty-fourth contract. But for every discovery there’s a wealth of opportunity that Roper walks away from, something he explains, humorously, in Wyevale’s cautionary tale, an ever-so-powerful chain that you watch uncomfortably closely.
“Wyevale at one point was close to £300m in revenue from around 130 properties,” he says. “That’s about £2m per centre, and at that size you’re going to struggle to make money. They got into this mentality that: we want to be national, we’ll just buy centres. Small, big, demographics didn’t matter. There was no logic in their decision. It had a garden center in a tin, so they bought it. The problem was in their DNA from the start, but it may have been over.
Blue Diamond’s filter remains narrow: demographics, history, geography, and what Roper calls the “shape” of the opportunity. “I have never said, where is my fifty-five center,” he said. “That megalomaniac approach is a disaster. It’s about quality opportunities, sustainable growth, and low debt on the balance sheet.” Asked where Blue Diamond will be in five years, he answers without theatrics: “If the right opportunities come, we can double in size.”
The most important change in the wider field was one that Roper saw coming ahead of his competitors. In February last year, food sales surpassed live plant sales across the UK garden center industry for the first time in four years. Blue Diamond Restaurant grew faster than its retail business by 2025. Head to Blue Diamond on a busy Saturday lunchtime and the line for breakfast, cake and afternoon tea can be like a regular dining group.
Roper bridles, gently, at the suggestion that his stores have entered into a celebration. “Catering goes back 30 years here. I had a big restaurant in a garden center 30 years ago. What happens is that some operators have been involved for a long time. Garden centers are a place to go, to relax in the day. Customers expect a nice restaurant where they can have breakfast or afternoon tea. It’s a must. Without a restaurant, I think you can lose part of your customers.”
The food court, he points out, is much smaller than the planteria and almost always sits at the end of the customer’s natural path through the store. “It’s part of the heartbeat. The pressure for us is to find more space to expand the restaurants. With growth, customers are showing an insatiable desire for them.”
The same sense of place lies behind the most controversial parts of Blue Diamond’s playbook: refusing to hit a single masterbrand across the site. Purchases at Wilton House, Chatsworth Estate, Grosvenor Estate and others all retain their original names, with Blue Diamond co-branded.
“Wilton was my first big move, back in 2001,” he says. “People came there because it was Wilton House Estate, you wouldn’t just call it Blue Diamond, we kept the name and added Blue Diamond to it. The same thing happened in Chatsworth, Grosvenor, and the new center we are building in Lord Iveagh’s Elveden Estate, which will be Elveden Garden Centre.” You’re hitting the standard business playbook. “Customers see their garden center as part of their local community. Over the years the Blue Diamond brand has played an integral role in the local brand. We are now in a sweet spot where they see us as one. When we redeveloped the three former Dobbies sites as Huntingdon Garden Center last year, we were getting ‘glad you’re coming’ emails before we opened.”
Equally unique is Blue Diamond’s commitment to British farmers. Unusually for a retailer of its size, the group will be exhibiting at the National Horticulture Trade Association’s plant show in Stoneleigh in June with the express aim of meeting small suppliers that are still out of stock. “Many farmers don’t meet with groups because they think we won’t be interested,” said Roper. “We will be. The challenge is volume. When we can’t take a grower across the country, we’ll isolate them, in the southwest or the northwest. Knowing the family that grows fuchsias is a strong USP. It’s a win for the grower, a win for us, and it’s something the customer really wants.”
Underpinning everything is data. Two decades ago Roper created what he calls the Best Practice Indicator, or BPI, an internal measurement engine that ranks every agency, department, division and line on how it turns profitability into profitability. The weekly league table ranks the 54 institutions in order, one to 54. When a facility is underperforming, BPI’s calculator that is now being rebuilt with artificial intelligence will tell the team which lines have been missed and why.
“It’s the eighty-twenty rule,” he says. “20 percent of your product does the most work — hydrangeas, salvias, the types you can’t go wrong with. The right plant, the right product, in the right place at the right time, at the right price. If you get all that right, conversions go up. If you don’t, customers feel like it’s hard work and they turn off.” That, he says, is what makes growth safe. “I wrote my own sales practices. I tell my team to describe their church and write their religion. When everyone is on the same page, you can give people ownership. But you can only give them ownership if you can measure their decisions. BPI does that.”
On consumer demand, Roper admits the big picture is difficult to read while the weather is still in control. “We’re dealing with the hottest, driest March and April of last year. So it’s hard to say what’s realistic.” At the high-ticket end, £2,000 garden furniture suits and £4,000 pergolas, he says he has yet to see a softening, “but I’m not a fool to think it’s not coming. I’m introducing the easy payment scheme because I think a revival is coming.” The change in business rates last year, he says, was a small success: small shops benefited, big sites got a six-figure increase, “but if it helps small businesses, I’m all for it.”
What would he do on a day on Number 11? He pauses, then offers something close to a manifesto. “I understand the need to reduce debt. But instead of punitive solutions that stifle growth, this government needs to consult with businesses about creating a more Thatcherite environment – or, to use an agricultural analogy, a growing environment where businesses can thrive, employ more people and pay more tax. At the moment, the reaction is knee-jerk and we end up hitting the ground running, fixing profits.” He sighs, briefly. “Some days I look at it all and think it will be easy to retire.” Then it’s laughter. “I won’t do that.”
