Patio Renovations Are Exploding Worldwide! New Business Opportunities Emerging!

During the epidemic, there were yard or patio makeover videos that hit YouTube. A large number of users filmed themselves remodeling their yards at home and uploaded them to YouTube. An online search for ‘gardening during quarantine’ turned up around 470,000 videos, with a high number of clicks and plays.

Nowadays, most families have their yard. Planting and decorating their yard has become a popular pastime for many families. People also enjoy socializing on a smaller scale, with patio parties and barbecues being highly sought after. Further unleashing the potential of patio supplies and thus allowing many companies to flock to this track.

Garden/Patio consumption explode worldwide

As the temperature rises, so does the patio consumer category, which sees its first peak of the year. 2020 coincided with the yard consumer boom brought about by the city’s home closure policy, and many sellers reaped significant revenue throughout the peak season.

Gardening goods such as lawnmowers, twig scissors, protective gloves, flower pot containers, and watering holes are not the only ones. Cooking equipment such as grills and smokers, and furniture sets such as outdoor hammocks, tables, and chairs also sell well. This has led to rapid growth in sales of the sub-categories Outdoor Power, Outdoor Décor, and Patio Furniture & Accessories.

There are two general reasons

➤The patio supply industry, which originally used offline shops as its main sales channel, has been hit by the epidemic. And many shops have started to switch online to open up new growth points.

➤With the impact of the epidemic on the global supply chain, production in some foreign factories was disrupted and orders that foreign sellers were unable to supply. This has therefore facilitated the flow of international orders, which also radiates to sellers doing cross-border e-commerce.

Klaviyo analyzed global gardening e-commerce data and found that global online sales of home gardening products grew by 100% in 2020 compared to the same period. Following this explosive growth, although e-commerce sales of yard products are gradually returning to rational growth, the compound annual growth rate over the last two years is still close to 20%.

The global horticulture market surpassed the US$100 billion mark in 2020; global demand for horticulture equipment and supplies is expected to grow steadily, reaching US$130 billion in sales by 2024. (Statista data)

A patio furniture manufacturer said:

“In the past two years, factory orders have surged, but material prices have also risen by more than 30%, coupled with rising shipping prices, the overall profit at the factory end did not rise too much. However, during the epidemic newly developed e-commerce channels, more opportunities than traditional foreign trade routes, profit margins are also large, the company is now also ready to increase investment in e-commerce channels.”

Now that May has arrived, patio merchandise is entering its peak e-commerce sales season. Recently, several Amazon merchants in the patio category have reported that some items have sold out overnight.

The current state of the industry

Currently, the patio supply industry has a well-developed infrastructure. The industry has formed a variety of upstream, midstream, and downstream convergence advantages, with significant supply chain advantages in the industry zone.

One seller from China said that it was with the local supply chain’s innovations, as well as the full chain of industry support from development, production to after-sales, that his company was able to create an electric lawn mower explosion and quadruple his shop’s revenue in three years.

In addition to technical innovation and a wide range of products, the patio supplies industry also has an advantage in terms of price and quality.

However, in the last two years, with the explosion of overseas patio consumption, more manufacturers have started to join the circuit. And homogenization and price wars have become more intense, with innovative product design and fine processing becoming more and more important.

The various segments of the patio industry are also moving towards a more advanced industrial base and modernized industrial chain. From large patio tables and chairs, and umbrellas, to small patio lamps, planters, and gardening tools. The patio supplies manufacturers that capture the segmented demand and have innovative, differentiated, and technical barriers to their products will have more core competitive advantages in the long run.

From a single product to a lifestyle

In 2021, the National Gardening Association surveyed US gardening enthusiasts and found that gardening participation had increased significantly compared to the pre-epidemic period, with 18.3 million new gardeners and 42% of enthusiasts increasing their hours of garden maintenance work. In addition, the demographics of millennial customers grew by 65% and the Gen Z population grew by 44% at garden centers in the US and Canada.

As families spend more time relaxing outdoors on the patio and the participants become younger, consumers are paying more attention to the comfort of the patio environment, i.e. they are demanding more from the quality, design, and integration of patio products, and new needs are being created in new living scenarios.

According to Houzz, Pinterest, Yardzen, and Google search data: In the past, consumers used to buy single items for patio consumption, such as needing to buy a table or a baking oven, and the specific consumption scenario often landed on offline hypermarkets and retail shops.

As the supply side continues to be enriched and consumers are faced with more choices, the difficulty of matching has become a common pain point, and set furniture and set gardening tools have become a hot sellers.

As the demand side gradually becomes unfocused from a single product to a fixed demand, the structure of the demand itself is changing. Consumers are hungry for more lifestyle needs to be met. Discovering the common pain points in life scenarios, adding technology research and development, product iteration, and refined operation will be the way to breakthrough for yard supplies businesses.

ZIEL has made structural innovations to the leisure recliner sunshade in the market, meeting the demand for step-less adjustment of the sunshade in the state of lying down and relaxing, thus increasing the positive feedback rate of customers in this category by 40%.

Digging into the pain points to improve quality is not a one-day process, but sellers can still detect the market trend from the subtleties and get close to consumer needs. The key is to be proactive and insightful.

Patio consumer outlook

As an example:

A survey shows that due to the epidemic, consumers have in recent years disliked dull colors such as black and that merchants can choose brighter colors with more ornaments and accents in their product selection.

This can also be seen in Google Trends, which shows that consumer interest in terracotta (+5.25%), rust (+4.61%), rose (+11.59%) and moss green (+17.56%) has increased significantly in recent years, with warm colors becoming popular theme color.

In addition, more and more consumers are paying attention to whether the materials are environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, recyclable, etc. In recent years, portable power sources and solar-powered patio tools have shown a good growth trend.

Chic gardening, comfortable patio naps, and lively barbecue parties have created the imagination of people for another kind of life. Compared to other categories of goods, outdoor patio items have a lot of room for expansion in worldwide markets and carry greater premium possibilities.

In the future, as patio products gradually develop in the direction of differentiation and intelligence, more small businesses will get out of the price war quagmire and enhance the added value of their products through product improvement and refined operations. New selling points and profit points will emerge for mid-range and high-end products, thus boosting the overall profit level of related enterprises and the industry.