How one order led to the birth of a company
It’s great to hear the stories behind how companies form, especially if they’re unusual, none more so than GardenSkill. The family business is based in Redditch, Worcestershire. It was (and is) a specialist in engineering and rubber moulding, with more than 40 years of experience.
Both founder Brooke Davis and his wife Carol are keen gardeners. Brooke, through his engineering background and talent for noticing problems and figuring out solutions, started to see how some equipment could be improved or changed to appeal to a different sort of gardener.
About 15 years ago, a small company approached Brooke to manufacture a mysterious green rubber ball, which eventually became the well-known Build-a-Ball, used to make fruit cages.
GardenSkill business was born
In 2009, the owner decided to get out of the business and handed over product rights to Brooke, so GardenSkill was born, now selling the whole fruit cages.
Other products designed by Brooke followed, firstly the pop-up cages, inspired by his son’s laundry bag at university and a folding triangular fly cover from his childhood in Nigeria. He remembered how flies were an absolute menace, so whenever they had tea outside, they needed to protect the milk and sugar – hence the fly guard.
With those two memories, he created a range of pop-up garden products – cages, giant pop-up cages and pop-up cloches for smaller and narrower growing patches.
Common-sense approach
The underlying principles of Brooke’s products are:
- Ease of assembly and use
- Light and flexible without losing core strength and build quality
- Convenient to store
- They must look great in the garden.
From there, Brooke moved on to pop-up greenhouses, raised beds and grow tunnels. He approaches each project by not looking just to recreate what’s already out there but to offer something different and hopefully better:
- Raised beds have curved edges so that they stack without falling over
- The cane ball has different size openings for connecting various thicknesses of bamboo cane.
GardenSkill is the UK’s largest supplier of pop-up garden products, including fruit and veg cages, cloches and tunnels, raised beds, gloves, netting, hand tools, pest control treatments and more.
