Glee to spotlight garden retail innovation

By Staff -- Casual Living, 8/1/2004

The John Stanley Innovation Center, a new concept and method for showcasing garden retail innovation, will debut Sept. 19-21 at Glee 2004.

Located at the National Exhibition Center in Birmingham, England, the center will feature seminars and demonstrations designed to offer ideas for improving retailing and merchandising.

"Glee is Europe's premier platform for garden and leisure innovation," John Stanley said. "Its huge retail audience is receptive to and hungry for new, profit boosting ideas."

Highlights will include concepts that allow for garden center cross-merchandising and lifestyle retailing so retailers can sell the complete experience. Another highlight will be temporary retail structures that can be cost effectively installed in any garden center.

Retailers will learn about a loyalty building technique, which is taking Australia and other countries by storm, and which Stanley is developing in the global garden center market. The Center will give retailers the opportunity to witness how the technique can be adapted to increase sales in their own part of the garden and leisure market.

Experts, who will be working alongside Stanley, form a consortium called Outdoor Merchandising Solutions. Although conventional exhibition spaces will display new products outside the center, Stanley is seeking and signing up leading-edge, retail innovators for the state of the art retail zone.