Podcast Ep 256: Fergal and Barry Doyle, co-owners of Arboretum, on how capturing trends is the key to fertile family business growth.
It’s that time of year where weather-permitting, Irish homeowners embrace the outdoors and garden centres are teaming with people focused on bringing their gardens to life.
We talk to brothers Barry and Fergal Doyle of Arboretum about how the lifestyle and gardening business that was started by their mother in Carlow in the 1970s has grown to become a €14m a year business.
“Every part of our business now has that sustainable story, and it’s hugely important to customers. About 85% of our plants are Irish grown, which is very important to us”
They talk about sustainability and how the business has sold half a million plants this year. Not only that they discuss their move into Dublin 1 to support the advent of the urban gardener.
Arboretum is an award-winning garden centre and lifestyle retailer. The family business, founded in rural County Carlow in 1977 by horticulturist Rachel Doyle, is today a €14m turnover enterprise employing 200 people in three locations.
The epitome of a green business
“Rachel founded the business at her home, gave up a teaching job when she was 24. She set up the business and was later joined by our father, Frank, who worked in the building trade”
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Arboretum Home and Garden heaven, the flagship store, occupies ten acres at Leighlinbridge, County Carlow. Arboretum Kilquade is the brand’s second garden centre.
Acquired in 2015, it is located at the former National Garden Exhibition Centre near Kilcoole, County Wicklow. Arboretum Urban Green opened in May 2023 on the first floor of iconic Dublin bookshop Chapters, located on Parnell Street close to the Mary Street shopping area.
Arboretum creates destination garden and lifestyle centres characterised by a wide range of plants including specimen plants and trees, along with gardening tools, seeds, bulbs, treatments, garden furniture and Weber barbecues. Each one has a high-quality in-house restaurant.
The business revealed recently that 85% of plant suppliers are Irish. Arboretum has nine Irish plant suppliers such are Doran’s Nurseries, Rentes Nurseries, O’Connor Nurseries, Mc Grane Nurseries, Youngs Nurseries, Tully’s Nurseries and more. Not only is the company brining greenery to customers, it is doing it in a sustainable way that positively impacts local ecosystems across Ireland.
70% of the produce used in the cafes and restaurants in Arboretum is locally source. Working with suppliers to bring the best in Irish fruit, vegetables and produce to all three locations.
Arboretum has sold 421,000 plants in the past twelve months. Across all three locations and through mostly Home Grown suppliers, Arboretum is making Ireland greener, one home at a time.
30 Irish brands available in all three stores and online. Arboretum’s commitment to working with Irish businesses isn’t limited to plants. Their range of lifestyle, fashion, gift, health and wellness brands includes a wide variety of well-known names such as Voya, Scribble & Stone, Pestle & Mortar and many more.
20,000 plants have been sold to urban dwellers since the opening of Arboretum Urban Green, located above Chapters Bookstore in Dublin 1.
Springing into action
I spoke with Fergal and Barry just as spring came to a triumphant sunny end and summer began.
“I think it’s the first year since Covid that we’ve had an early spring like this and got a really good run,” Fergal explains. “And it’s great for momentum in gardening, gets people out early. Communion and confirmations have been big over the last couple of weeks with young gardeners doing a bit of work on their gardens for getting ready for those big events in their children’s lives.
“We are a lot more than a garden centre. The cafe is 33% of our business in two of our locations, and it’s a huge part of it. Seasonally, there are big events – the Christmas period is massive for us. But yes, April and May are the big months of the year.”
They have crafted Arboretum into a destination for all times of the year. “Over the years you endeavour to take the bad months out of the year and make sure we try to stay as profitable as possible,” Barry adds. “When you’re up to big numbers in staffing, you have to make sure every month has something to offer. Gardening as such, in planting season is September, October, but then into the Christmas period, and then working your way back around to hopefully an early spring.
“Through the summer months, you’ve got garden furniture and barbecues that appeal to people. We’ve added categories like wellness gifts where fashion has become a big part of the two stores in Carlow and Kilquade. Urban Green is just a very different offering – it’s a concept store for urban living with house plants for people living in apartments in Dublin city. We have the house plants, our restaurant in the store, and then we have a lot of other gifting items that appeal to someone living in inner city Dublin.”
Entrepreneurial roots
They speak with pride about how their mother Rachel literally broke new ground in terms of female entrepreneurship in Ireland.
“achel is a great networker and grew her own network internationally”
“Rachel founded the business at her home, gave up a teaching job when she was 24,” Fergal explains. “She set up the business and was later joined by our father, Frank, who worked in the building trade. From the late 70s into the 80s, they rented a site in Carlow town and set up the first Arboretum business outside of her garage and back garden.
“They went through good times and troubling times. It was tough running a business in the 80s. Interest rates were extremely high in the early 90s. They had big issues with flooding on the site – a lot of hurdles to overcome. Fast forward to moving out of Carlow and bringing the site down to where we live, close to the family home in Leighlinbridge, which is an 11.5-acre site. That’s the Arboretum HQ as we know it today.
“Rachel is a great networker and grew her own network internationally. She became a member of the International Garden Centre Association and brought Ireland along to be members. That opened us up to global ideas, particularly from our friends in the UK. Now, through Barry and myself going to those congresses globally, we’ve become friends with the next generation that have taken over those garden centres.
“The ideas we got from those – as mum said – R&D is ‘Rob and Duplicate’, as opposed to ‘Research and Development’ in her book. We’ve evolved a lot through those ideas, and that’s given us the confidence to look at what others are doing. Later on, Arboretum became a member of Retail Excellence Ireland, which opened us up to other categories of retail. It’s that whole networking and collaboration that gives you confidence.”
Growing with confidence
In 2015, the opportunity came up to buy Arboretum Kilquade, which was a going concern, also known as the National Garden Exhibition Centre. “We’ve retained those gardens. Arboretum then developed a €4.5m expansion that we completed this time last year.
“We were the first garden centre in Ireland to have a cafe. That’s been big in the UK for a number of years, but across Europe, it’s only still starting to become a big thing. It’s huge for driving our footfall”
“Urban Green in the middle came about through one of our non-executive directors, Kevin Neary. They bought Chapters bookstore in Parnell Street, which is an iconic bookstore in the city center, and there’s a nice space above that – 14,000 square feet – for us to trial an urbanised concept, bringing the food element that Arboretum can offer, plus coffee and indoor plants.”
It’s hard to imagine how the dizzying changes in the geopolitical space can impact on an Irish gardening business but no sector, it seems, is immune. The one thing that matters, however, is the weather.
“Whatever is happening in the geopolitical world, that yellow thing in the sky has been shining, and the business gets an incredible bounce from that. What matters to us is good weather and sunshine in spring.
“We’ve had a few consecutive springs now where it hasn’t happened. Last spring was particularly bad in Western Europe, particularly the UK, the Netherlands, and ourselves. We had a really wet, horrible time last year. You have to go back to March-April 2020 to remember when we had this good of a start. That’s what matters to the gardening season.”
Barry adds: “Fergal and myself have been very fortunate to grow up in an environment with Rachel and Frank, who’ve literally been on the cusp of driving retail and garden centre retail in Ireland. We kind of take it for granted because we don’t know anything else. It was the dinner table conversation on a Sunday evening and the breakfast table on a Monday morning.”
He said that spotting trends is the key to maintaining momentum. “We were the first garden centre in Ireland to have a cafe. That’s been big in the UK for a number of years, but across Europe, it’s only still starting to become a big thing. It’s huge for driving our footfall. We’re always looking at the trends. We visit a lot of shows, looking at what trends are in the different categories and what new categories we can explore.”
“We didn’t always do ladies fashion, but when we identified that 70% of our customers are female, we knew we had a big target market of female customers coming into the garden centre – through the cafe, through families visiting, and through the gardening side. So we focused on that and made sure we had something to appeal to them with the ladies wear section. Fashion has been really positive for both Carlow and Kilquade.
“Gardening, furniture, and barbecue fall hand in glove. Barbecues have been really strong for us over the years. We’re a Weber world dealer. If we get an early spring, people make their garden look fantastic. Come June and July, they’re thinking about spending time in that lovely space they’ve created and buying a barbecue or furniture. We’re always looking for something new in categories and departments.”
The rise of the urban gardener
Fergal explains that the new category of urban gardens as delivered through Urban Green is one of those trends.
“If you have a garden and a book, you have everything, so it’s complementary to the bookstore. It’s still a concept – there’s not many cities where you can see loads of indoor plant offerings like this. Maybe a little bit in London or New York, but even there it’s few and far between.
“There is more interest though. The stats from Bord Bia, who conduct insight reports on households, show increasing numbers of people living in apartments with smaller spaces but still having an interest in plants. They’re not sure what the solution is, and they need support and education, which we feel we offer. During Covid, there was a huge interest from 18-20 year olds in indoor plants for their bedrooms and homes.”
Sustainability, is unsurprisingly, at the core of a business that supports people with green fingers.
“Every part of our business now has that sustainable story, and it’s hugely important to customers. About 85% of our plants are Irish grown, which is very important to us as we’re supporting Irish growers. We don’t have air miles on the plants as such. We’re not completely all Irish – there are certain plants we need to import from Holland or Italy – but it’s great to have such a high proportion of our plants being Irish grown.
“That goes right down to the recyclable pots and coffee cups. We now have a new soap company taking our coffee grounds and using them in soap, which is a full circle sustainable story. We’ve done a huge amount of work on the building side with Kilquade and Carlow on sustainability.
“When we go to trade shows, packaging is part of the conversation. It’s not just a candle in a jar anymore – it’s what’s in the candle itself, where the jar comes from, and what’s the packaging around it, because consumers are asking those questions. Our business being so green, we have to be at the forefront of the sustainable story.”
Fergal adds: “It matters a lot more to younger people. Apart from it being the right thing to do, when we’re building a new facility, one of the first things is making sure the building is green. We’re selling plants and have gardens, so there’s a huge amount of green going on, but we’ve decided to take steps like installing rainwater harvesting tanks below ground. We take water off the roof and use it to water the benches our plants sit on. The benches are ebb and flow, so the plant sits in the water, soaks it up, and those are the plants customers buy.
“We’ve put a lot of solar panels on the roof, and with LED technology, we’ve front-loaded investment to ensure the facility downstream is less costly to run and has a sustainable story. That’s an attractive story to tell when you’re recruiting young people, because it matters more to those employees.”
Main image at top: Barry Doyle, co-owner and CEO, and Fergal Doyle, co-owner and Chief Commercial Operator in Arboretum Kilquade garden and retail centre. Photo: Andres Poveda
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