The Monday bench walk in May
It rained all last week and the bedding barely moved. On Friday the forecast turned, Saturday was glorious and the car park was full by ten. By Sunday afternoon the petunias, geraniums and trailing plants in the popular colours were gone, and the benches were a patchwork of begonias nobody wanted. On Monday your buyer walks the area with a clipboard, counts gaps and rings the growers.
One grower's cut-off for Thursday delivery was Monday at noon, which she just made. The other's was Friday, so those plants arrive the following Tuesday, after the next weekend. The weekend after that is a bank holiday and she is guessing again.
Where the timing goes wrong
Bedding is a short, sharp season driven by weather, and the information needed to reorder well is scattered. Sales are in the EPOS, often under a handful of generic bedding codes. Bench stock is only known by looking. Grower cut-offs and trolley minimums live in emails and the buyer's head. The forecast is on someone's phone.
- Bedding sold under generic price codes, such as a single code for all six-packs, hides which varieties sell.
- Stock on the bench is never recorded, so sell-through cannot be calculated.
- Each grower has different cut-off days, minimum trolley quantities and delivery days.
- The forecast is checked informally, and not tied to order decisions.
- Holiday cover means a second person reorders without the buyer's instincts.
The price of a late trolley
Empty benches on a sunny Saturday are sales you do not get back. Customers who came for a particular colour go to the supermarket or the DIY shed on the way home. Late trolleys then land in a quiet week and sit, getting leggy, until they are marked down or thrown away.
The buyer spends the season reacting instead of planning, and the knowledge of what sold when is lost at the end of it, because nobody wrote it down in a way that can be used next year.
Building a reorder view for bedding
- We map your bedding price codes to the lines you actually buy, so sales can be split by variety and pack size, adding simple codes where needed.
- A quick weekly count, done on a phone by the plant team, records trolley shelves remaining per line.
- Daily sales from your EPOS are combined with those counts to show sell-through and days of cover.
- Each grower's cut-off, delivery days and trolley rules are stored, so the view shows the latest order that still lands before the weekend.
- A weather forecast feed for your postcode flags warm, dry weekends so the buyer can decide whether to order up.
- The buyer gets a draft order per grower to review, adjust and send, never an automatic order.
| Input | Where it comes from | What it tells the buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Daily sales by line | EPOS | What is moving |
| Bench stock | Weekly phone count | What is left |
| Grower cut-offs | Stored supplier rules | When to order by |
| Weather forecast | Forecast feed | Whether demand will jump |
| Last season | Saved history | What happened at the same point |
The buyer stays in charge. The system shows what the numbers say and when the last safe order time is. It does not guess plant quality or decide on new varieties.
A season that is planned, not chased
On Monday morning the buyer opens one screen instead of three. It shows which lines will run out before Saturday at the current rate, which grower needs an order today to deliver in time, and a note that the weekend looks warm. The order goes out before noon, with the trolley quantities already worked out.
At the end of the season the data stays. Next spring the buyer can see exactly when the geraniums took off last year and how the weather affected it, which makes the first orders far less of a gamble.
Signs your bedding orders are running behind
- Popular colours sell out on sunny weekends and arrive the following week.
- Bedding is sold under a few generic codes that hide varieties.
- Grower cut-off days are known only to the buyer.
- Late deliveries often end up marked down or thrown away.
- Nobody can say what sold in the same week last year.