Patio Retail Survey Report – The Right Direction
By Richard Wright
At the beginning of January, Hearth & Home sent a questionnaire to 1,200 patio retailers; a total of 151 were returned completed and usable.
It wasn’t that long ago that patio furnishings retailers felt strongly that Big Box stores and Mass Merchants were their toughest competition. Today, only 8% of patio retailers feel that Mass Merchants are their toughest competition, and only 24% tell us it’s Big Box stores.
Right now, 42% of patio furnishings retailers feel their toughest competition is coming from Internet sales, and that number will only increase in the coming years.
| Toughest Competition | |
|---|---|
| Seller | % of Retailers |
| Internet Sales | 42% |
| Big Box Stores | 24% |
| Other Patio Stores | 19% |
| Mass Merchants | 8% |
| Furniture Stores | 12% |
| Catalogs | 6% |
| Forty-two percent of patio furnishings retailers now feel that Internet Sales are their toughest competition. | |
It’s easy to dismiss a 3% increase in sales as being almost too small to mention, until you look to the left of this chart and see how bad business really was in the years from 2007 to 2013.
Move to the Regional Look chart (below) and notice that only the Midwest Region had more retailers who had a negative year than a positive one. Canada is a different story altogether. The Canadian dollar (loonie) has been worth around 74 cent vs. the U.S. dollar for about two years now, and it may be another two years before parity is once again in place.
Canadian manufacturers selling into the U.S make out very well indeed. Not so with Canadian retailers; importing patio furnishings from companies in the U.S. is very expensive, so much so that consumers in Canada balk at the price.
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| A sales increase of 3% in 2016 is at least going in the right direction, but it’s a far cry from the whopping 13.3% posted in 2014. | |
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| Westerners like to strut their stuff, so they should be thrilled with 75% of retailers posting a positive year. Canadians, on the other hand, are suffering from a currency differential that makes patio furnishings imported from the States just too expensive for most consumers. | |
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Only 72% of patio retailers placed early-buy orders. |
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Forty-one percent of patio retailers tell us their patio sales were up over the prior year; 33% were the same, and 26% were down. |
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Only 17% of patio furnishings retailers increased their early-buy orders for product to be sold in 2017; 28% decreased their orders. |
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The average patio retailer derives 48% of his/her revenue from Outdoor Furniture; 33% from Hearth Products; 14% from Barbecue Products, 11% from Other, and 4% from Spas, and 3% from Indoor Wicker and Rattan. |
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Twenty-seven percent of patio retailers surveyed had an average sales ticket of $200 to $1,000; 37% were in the $1,001 to $2,000 range; 23% were in the $2,001 to $4,000 range, and 13% were over $4,000. |
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Forty-one percent of patio retailers have an indoor selling area under 3,000 sq. ft.; 15% have between 3,001 and 5,000 sq. ft.; 23% have between 5,001 and 10,000 sq. ft., and 21% have over 10,000 sq. ft. |
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Of those retailers who do sell patio furnishings over the Internet, 35% limit those sales to their market area, meaning, of course, that 65% do not. |
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Seventy-four percent of patio retailers do not sell over the Internet, while 3% are doing half of their business that way. |
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Forty-six percent of patio retailers have an outdoor selling area under 1,000 sq. ft.; 42% have between 1,001 and 5,000 sq. ft., and 12% have over 5,000 sq. ft. |
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Only 5% of patio retailers have four or five stores. |
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