by Holly Taylor | May 10, 2019 | Gardening Posts
Zinnia ‘Queeny Mixed’, Watermelon Mini Love F1, Cosmos ‘Apricot Lemonade’ and Tomato Gourmandia F1
We’re delighted to announce the launch of our new retail seed range for 2019/20 which will be available in garden centres from early July 2019.
With continued focus on innovation and exciting new products, we’re launching over 50 new seed varieties for the second year in a row. Amongst the flowers to be added to the range are the stunning Cosmos ‘Apricot Lemonade’ and Nasturtium ‘Baby Deep Rose’; whilst the vegetable selection includes Dwarf Bean Caledonia, Spring Onion Totem and Watermelon Mini Love F1.
At our annual retail sales conference, we decided to promote new seed varieties – stunning Zinnia ‘Queeny Mixed’ as the 2019/20 Flower of the Year – and flavoursome, heart-shaped tomato, Gourmandia F1 as Vegetable of the Year.
Alongside the continued focus on innovation, another key objective for the upcoming season is to maintain even closer partnership with our customers, offering bespoke and tailored solutions; from custom POS, to tailored ranges, to individual garden centre selling and promotional material.
Joseph Cordy, our Head of B2B Sales, said:
“Here at T&M, we don’t believe in ‘one solution fits all’ and so we plan to continue to work in close partnership with our customers to find individual solutions to maximise their sales”.
“We’re thrilled to be offering this fantastic range for next season – and we’ve managed to also hold our seed prices for the second year in a row which is a great bonus for all our customers”.
Thompson & Morgan is also launching a number of new seed collections, including ‘Autumn Collections’ which aims to boost sales during the autumn months, as well as new ‘hotspot’ stands featuring ‘Packet to Plate’ and ‘Bred by T&M’ seed varieties. A number of exciting new complementary products will run alongside the seed range, including incredicoir – the latest product in our successful incredi range – a coir block which makes up to the equivalent of a 10 litre bag of peat-free compost once water is added.
For further information on T&M’s new retail range, please contact Joseph Cordy.
by Holly Taylor | Nov 5, 2013 | Michael Perry's Gardening Blog
It’s a busy time for us at Thompson & Morgan, here’s a taster of a typical week at work for me!
Monday
After a few days off, it’s back in fresh and early for a varied week of meetings, product research and catalogue preparations.
Today I meet with Sarah, our trials manager, to discuss how we can enhance our customer trials programme. This is a project we’ve been running for 3 years now, and it involves sending our products to a selected group of customers and asking them what they think of them. We get some very good, honest comments and some photography which is almost as good as our own!
Sarah and I also chat through which plants we’re going to grow to enter for Plant of the Year at Chelsea Flower Show. This is a very tricky project as the plants have to be grown out of season, which means they’ll need extra warmth and lights. We draw up a shortlist which we’ll then run past Paul Hansord, our horticultural director, as soon as we can, as we’ll soon need to start taking cuttings! In 2012, we WON Plant of the Year for our innovative Foxglove ‘Illumination Pink’. Bred by our amazing plant breeder, Charles Valin, this is a ‘futuristic foxglove’, which flowers much longer than older types and is in exotic colours never, ever seen before!
The monster pumpkin – can you guess how many seeds are in it?
Tuesday
It’s the week of Halloween, so today I make sure we’ve given our ‘count the seeds in the pumpkin’ competition the push it needs, which means updating and scheduling my social media accounts, and also setting the dates of the seed count into my diary, just so we don’t forget! I also notice that the Great British Garden Revival information is starting to leak through social media. This is a programme that was filmed at our trials site during the summer, and I should be featuring in the ‘bedding’ episode. It’s a new series, designed to make gardening a bit trendy again. We don’t have definite broadcast dates yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do.
Filming at our trials site
Wednesday
This week is one of the last weeks before the big spring plant catalogue goes to the printers, so I’m working closely with the catalogue team to make sure they have everything they need from me for the new products. There are about 70 products, so this has been a lot of work over the last few months; speaking to suppliers, assessing trials, instructing photography (with our new photographer, Helen Freeman), writing copy notes, working out the main selling points and so on. We have some EXCELLENT new products – I won’t give too much away, but imagine a ‘blue’ carnation and an azalea-flowered geranium for starters…
Thursday
Lots of catching up on e-mails today, there’s always so much going on, product development never seems to stop, and sometimes I could be talking to suppliers about products that might be 15 or 20 years away! It took us 15 years to develop the TomTato®, which you may have seen recently, it’s a plant which produces tomatoes AND potatoes. The plants are simply grafted together – it’s not a new concept, but we are the first company to make a large amount of plants and to marry up a high quality, sweet tomato with a good cropping white potato.
Friday
Some of today is spent preparing for Saturday’s QVC show. We regularly sell our plants through this shopping channel on TV, and I’m a brand ambassador for Thompson & Morgan on the show. This week it’s a gift show and we’re selling a Christmas tree! I make sure we get some good photos of me lifting it (it was heavy!), and working with Sarah Dodsworth from the QVC team, we agree on the main selling points, and also source some photos of bad Christmas trees. This will all help make the sell stronger; our Christmas tree is the no-drop, no-flop tree, one of the highest quality money can buy. I try to get to bed early, so I can get up at 5am (yuk) to travel down to Chiswick for the show.
It’s really heavy!
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