Shopfloor RETAILER PROFILE: POTTERS HOME DIGITAL
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Just off the high street in the quaint Kentish town of Tenterden, ERT Award-winning Potters Home Digital offers a unique and awe-inspiring showcase of both indoor and outdoor smart home entertainment. In fact, not just audio and visual products, but garden cooking and artistic lighting with cleverly hidden features as well.
The idea for their very own smart garden of England came from Directors Lance Hopley and Alex Jones, and it’s safe to say it is truly one of a kind – certainly within the UK and Europe.
Potters, which first opened in 1913, has been based in the same building for over 40 years and Mr Hopley has been involved in the business for around the same amount of time. He took over from his father who ran it before him. Mr Jones has been with the business for 21 years. There are nine members of staff, including three in-house installer/engineers.
Tucked away at the back of the store with neat box hedging and sprawling plants, the Smart Home Garden officially opened in May 2022. Then, in the October, Mr Jones and Mr Hopley were at the ERT Awards picking up the trophy for the prestigious Turning Point Award! ERT Editor, Jack Cheeseman, paid a visit and sat down with Mr Jones (pictured right with his ERT Awards trophy) to learn all about the garden’s
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“It is a show garden, but interlaced with a humongous amount of smart technology.” ERT award-winning Potters Home Digital offers a truly immersive outdoor living experience, but it’s what you don’t see that’s most impressive!
inception and how the retailer is carving out its own brand new niche in this emerging corner of the home entertainment market. “Lance and I realised the garden was an unused space and we knew we had an opportunity to maximise that as retail space,” he explains. “It was a long journey from conception to completion, with a lot of hard work in between! We actually had the idea and put plans in place before Covid, which then obviously caused huge delays with the building work. “We were delighted and honoured to win the Turning Point Award and be recognised for our new unique business model.”
Mr Jones says they were closely following market trends in the USA and a survey from speaker company, Sonance, highlighted that lighting, audio and video were the top things consumers were considering with new landscape projects.
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