4. Doorstep Diaries - It's time to talk about the pivot…

It's time to talk about the pivot… So we set up this reactive lockdown start up and when we came down to our second year of business, we quickly became aware that the situation was very different. Of course COVID was a bit more under control, but more importantly, the gardening industry has boomed, a 48.5% increase in sales of online plants. And now the garden centres were open.?

So when we started reaching out to our suppliers in the UK we found that those garden centers had pre-allocated all the stock that we were accessing the year before. So we couldn't get stock in the UK and our second route for stock was from Holland and as a result of Brexit, whereas pre-Brexit plants were leaving Holland at five, six in the morning and by lunchtime, they were with us. Now, they were taking a few days and prices had increased 30%.?

So as a team we made a decision that we weren't going to market ourselves to new customers. We were just going to focus on our existing mailing list that had about 700 customers on it and we were going to deliver it to them. We knew based on common data of returning spend that was going to mean a huge cut in our turnover, but we were most worried about our reputation and in reality.?

I think what happened is we had a lot of very loyal customers who did return to us. And I fear that a lot of them probably were left a little bit disappointed because the previous year we were sourcing amazing quality stock. So if you ordered a collection of plants from us the year before, and then you ordered in the second year, they wouldn't have been up to the same standards and reputation is everything.

We delivered for a few weeks and then we decided to stop on it. So we delivered for a few weeks and then we decided to step back from that side of the business. And as founders, we also decided that the van that we'd invested in the idea of a delivery business, wasn't going to work.?

We reflected with what was the deeper element of what our customers sought from us and all across the last year, we've found that people were continually reaching out to us for advice, for guidance on their whole garden. And what they should do on how these collections of plants fitted in the greater context.

So we started to explore a design as a potential route for us to look at, could we make design more accessible and more affordable? And so we partnered up with fantastic Paul who had a framework for that, working with landscapers and we started to talk to customers.? We found that, although there was an interest, we ran some webinars and quite a few people attended, actually getting conversion was very, very hard.

I think that's because people wanted guidance. And we had a solution for them, but it put the onus on them to collect all of this information and it just meant they didn't convert. In fact, there were some people who filled in all the information and they still didn't convert.This was in the spring, early summer.?

And then life comes along. In the summer, a few things happened personally back at home. My father was a hundred years old and he was not well and then passed away. And so I took a few months off from the business and stopped thinking about it, to be honest, and I guess in the back of my head, I thought, well, that was good while it lasted. And I sort of had a sense of pride that in the years to come, when my son asked me, ‘daddy, what did you do during the pandemic?’ Not quite what did you do in the war, but our generation's version of that. I'd be able to say that we made something happen. I rolled my sleeves up. I got in a van and wasn't that great.??

And so I took the summer off and then mid August, I had mentored a university startup, and the marketing person on that project had reached out to me and asked if she could do an internship. And so we lined up the start of that internship for the middle of August. And so in my head that meant I've got this bright, enthusiastic, graduate, NJ who's going to be starting with me, and I've always thought within internships that it's more important that I understand what the intern wants to get from the experience and ensure that over the course of the weeks they get that.

And so N J was due to start a marketing masters and what we planned out was, Right! We're going to develop the pivot of this business in four weeks. We're going to have tested hypothesis research with customers, and we're going to have a clear sense of what the future of this business is. And I think for both of us, that was a fantastic opportunity, for me to have someone on my case and to be giving me the structure to achieve that goal. And for NJ, well, previous internships she'd done, she'd been doing filling and admin and here she would be building a brand.?

So we got to work. The joy of a pivot is you’ve got something to work from. It's not an idea, You've built a business, you've built something, you've achieved something. And there's so many learnings in that that you can take forward. And for us, one of the real joys was we'd had over 900 customers and personally I had delivered to hundreds of them and taken the time to get to know them. Some of them well enough to meet up for a barbecue or a coffee and to listen to their thoughts, their desires, their needs.

The challenge that we landed on was the customer that we're talking to is a homeowner, not just a gardener. Homeowners who have worked on their homes, they’ve made the interior of the home really nice, they've maybe done an extension. They've gone up in the attic, but when it comes to the garden, They're completely overwhelmed.

If they want to do something with their garden, their first step is to go to a garden centre. But when they go there immediately, they're presented by plants with latin names that don't look like the plants that they're going to have in their garden. Two, three years later, they might have a sense of gardens that they've liked that they've visited, but how you actually put that together is incredibly challenging.?

And so as a result, that leads to a lack of confidence. And as a result of that, with their lack of knowledge, they either dip their toe in, spend a little bit of money and that either peaks their interest in gardening. Or like me, when I bought my house, you spend 50 quid on plants, you get them in your garden and they don't flourish and you lack the inspiration to go further and you do nothing.

That thought is where our pivot developed from. And in the next episode, I will expand on where that led us to and the solution.