How Car Charging Stations Can Put Your Garden Centre on the Map

As the growing number of electric car drivers in the UK look for places to recharge their vehicles whilst they are out and about, EV charging hubs with multiple charge points are going to be increasingly in demand.

If there are multiple opportunities for drivers to charge simultaneously at one site, as opposed to if there is only a single charger available, the more electric vehicle (EV) drivers a site will attract.

In this blog, Elizabeth Warren, Director of Public Charging at Mer UK, shares why garden centres are a prime destination to install an EV charging hub, including:

• The value car charging stations add to the customer experience
• How EV charging helps garden centres retain and attract customers
• The environmental benefits charging stations bring

EV charging stations – what’s in it for the garden centre?

Attract new customers, and retain your current ones

With a charging hub, garden centre owners can establish consumer habits in their favour whilst the EV transition is still happening and prevent existing customers from driving to other locations to charge and, incidentally, shop.

As well as retaining current customers, garden centres with charging facilities can expect a whole new wave of customers to start frequenting the site. When EV drivers who have not visited your centre before, realise that you have an EV charging, you can bet they will pay you a return visit.

At a garden centre, the time it takes for an EV to charge on a rapid/ultra-rapid charge point can be spent shopping, eating, relaxing, catching up with friends, or all the above. A positive customer experience is essential in a competitive market, and drivers are more like to want to go to an EV charging hub site where they can occupy their time whilst their vehicle charges.

In turn, this added value experience brings more people to the garden centre, as incidental spending will increase and it will also put the centre on the map for new customers who may not have known about the centre prior.

Grow greener with an environmentally friendly EV charging hub

With a large portion of the global sustainability conversation focussing on carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and wildlife conservation, it’s impossible to see garden centres as anything other than beacons of hope for a sustainable future. Garden centres are already demonstrating an environmentally conscious ethos, playing their part in greening our country by banning single-use plastics and increasing the use of recyclable materials, to name but a few initiatives.

The environmental benefits of driving electric rather than driving in a fossil fuel vehicle are well reported. Providing EV charging points will bring a new level to a garden centre’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments, and centres can expect significant reductions in CO2 from visitor travel, especially when the energy supplying the charge points comes from renewable sources.

How have other garden centres used EV charging to their advantage?

Several Blue Diamond garden centres are home to EV charging hubs

The second largest garden centre group in the UK and the Channel Islands turned to Mer when looking for new ways to enhance the customer experience at its centres.

Mer began rolling out Blue Diamond’s charging infrastructure in 2023, with a mix of Mer’s fast chargers, and rapid and ultra-rapid charge points. The roll-out is still on going, and so far, Mer has installed charging hubs at the following locations:

• Worcester garden centre: four 150kW ultra-rapid EV chargers.
• Sanders garden centre: one 22kW fast and four 150kW ultra rapid charge points .
• Tunbridge Wells garden centre: one 22kW fast and four 150kW ultra-rapid charge points.
• Derby garden centre: one 7kW slow and four 150kW ultra rapid charge points.

Over 5,250 unique customers have charged at Mer’s Blue Diamond sites so far. To date, in excess of 200,000 kilowatt hours have been vended across the portfolio, enabling more than 600,00 green EV miles. These insights highlight the value the EV charging hubs across the Blue Diamond portfolio are bringing already.

Charging hubs will be coming soon to Blue Diamond’s garden centres in Trelawny (Cornwall), Bridgemere (Cheshire), Fryer’s (Cheshire), and Harlow (Essex).