How Did Dobbies Get Its Garden Credentials Back?
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David Robinson had good news to share when he sat down with Trevor Pfeiffer, Editor & Director of Garden Trade News, on Centre Stage at Glee Birmingham 2026.
As Chief Executive Officer of Dobbies Garden Centres, he'd just watched the business post revenue up 10% to £221.8m and swing to positive EBITDA, a sharp turnaround from a £7.8m loss the year before.
What went wrong at Dobbies in the first place?
Robinson didn't dress it up. "The business lost sight of its colleagues and its customers," he said, "and it spent a lot of time thinking about financials and spreadsheets and banking and other things but actually had lost sight of the customers."
So, the team went back to shoppers and general managers to work out what had gone missing, and the answer turned out to be embarrassingly simple. "This isn't going to be rocket science," Robinson admitted, "but we'd lost our garden credentials." Some of the lines that had quietly disappeared from shelves mattered far more to gardeners than anyone at head office had realised. "If I heard the word tree stump killer once, I heard it lots of times," he said. Eighteen months on, gardening ranges are the fastest growing part of the business.
Why did Dobbies walk away from Waitrose?
Food turned out to be just as revealing. Between January and March, Dobbies ended its food hall partnership with Waitrose and built its own offer instead, a decision that came straight from customer feedback. "We don't want a supermarket experience in a garden centre," Robinson explained. "We want something quieter, calmer. We want to be able to browse. We want to be able to find something that we can't find in the supermarket."
That meant "2,000 products, new products, new suppliers" in just two or three months. The gamble paid off. The £1.5m foodhall concept has performed ahead of expectations, and as Robinson put it, "it's much better for the P&L as well." It fits a pattern playing out across the sector too, with GCA members reporting catering made up 36% of total sales in January and food hall sales up more than 15% year on year. For food and drink brands eyeing this channel, the lesson is that premiumisation here isn't really about price. It's about discovery, giving shoppers something they can't just pick up on their weekly supermarket run.
Restaurants got the same treatment, with a new leadership team pulled in from Pizza Express, Starbucks and Bettys. Robinson's reasoning was blunt: "they're a reason to come and visit, they're a reason to prolong your stay." It's part of a wider shift we've written about before in the rise of the lifestyle garden centre.
Are garden centres the best day out in retail?
Robinson genuinely seems to think so. He calls them "a brilliantly affordable day out", the kind of place where "I can spend 10 or 20 quid, take a whole morning or a whole afternoon, be with friends." Having spent years at retailers fighting to get shoppers through the door, the contrast still seems to delight him. "They come of their own free will," he said.
That belief is driving the store refurbishment programme, with £4m invested across seven stores so far. Toilets always make the list, on the theory that "if your toilets are clean, we think your kitchens are clean", and payback has come faster than on any refurb Robinson has run before.
What are micro seasons, and why should suppliers care?
One of the more useful ideas from the session was what Dobbies internally calls micro seasons, the short windows when a single category suddenly goes mad, tomatoes, for instance, over about six to eight weeks in early summer. Experienced growers know what they're doing, but newer customers often don't, so Dobbies now pulls together complete solutions each month, everything from strawberries to lawn care in one place. Sales went up, customers were happier, and Robinson had a clear ask for suppliers: "if you've got products that are highly seasonal, for heaven's sake, come and knock on our door, because actually we want to make it really easy for customers to shop and then that actually means we both shift some more stock."
Outdoor living followed a similar path. Customers had told Dobbies its barbecue range was "a bit puny", so the business invested, and Gillingham alone more than doubled its barbecue sales as a result.
What does Dobbies want from its garden suppliers now?
Partnership, more than anything, and Robinson was direct about what that means. "It's all very well selling stock in," he said, "but if it doesn't sell, we ain't rebuying it and we're probably not restocking it." His summary was equally plain: "for us it's all about partnership and joint space sales out not sales in."
Store teams have more freedom too, with general managers now writing their own business plans and the whole centre bonused against them. Some of the best ideas are coming straight from the shop floor. Plants merchandised inside pots at Beaconsfield went down so well that Robinson wants it rolled out everywhere. "That's so good, we now need to put that into 53 stores.”
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