How Henry Bell Transformed Retail Merchandising at Gates Garden Centre

If you run a category bay inside a bigger footprint, this is the kind of before-and-after worth tearing apart.

What actually changed on the fixture

The redesign was led on the supplier side by Henry Bell national sales manager Andrew Mellowes and agent Dominic Wright, who walked the aisles with Gates' in-house team before a single shelf was moved. The brief was tight: smooth customer flow through the wild bird category, claw back more shelf space for seed mixes — including two of Gates' own-label lines — and carve out proper promotional bays instead of letting those endcap zones drift into dead stock.

Mellowes framed it this way: "Good merchandising doesn't just happen by chance — every element has to be carefully planned and considered. Using our expertise in this field, we have successfully created an enhanced consumer shopping experience by generating a category journey in which no product lines are missed. This allows customers to make more informed purchasing decisions and helps to drive up basket spend and grow sales."

That's the lens worth borrowing. The win isn't a prettier shelf — it's a designed category journey where no SKU gets skipped because sightlines collapse mid-aisle.

What to pressure-test on your own floor

A few questions worth asking after reading this:

• Where do shoppers actually pause in your category zone? If you can't answer that from POS data or even a two-hour floor count, your planogram is guessing, not selling.
• Are your own-label lines getting equal shelf real estate? Gates gave two of its house brands a proper seat at the table alongside Henry Bell's range — margin protection built into the fixture, not negotiated at the till.
• Do your promotional bays earn their footprint? A wobbler in a dead corner isn't a promotion; it's a write-off. Mellowes' team specifically built promotional areas into the new layout, which means they planned where impulse behaviour should happen, not just where leftover product landed.

Roll-out worth watching

Gates' senior manager Natalie Gregg is already talking about peak season: "We are thrilled with the new merchandising, which has brought a real breath of fresh air to our wild bird sales area... we're really looking forward to moving into one of our busiest times of the year with clear and attractive displays that support our work and set tills ringing."

A similar programme is lined up for Gates' second centre at Woodlands Hinckley in the coming weeks, so we get a near-term chance to see whether the same planogram travels cleanly to a different footprint — or whether it needs re-engineering for sightlines and dwell time on a new floor. Either answer is useful data for anyone planning a category refresh of their own.