And be thought a fool,
Than to speak and remove all doubt?
Here what I said to the 240 assembled GLDA seminar delegates the other day (The link to the slides I used is HERE);
Hello, good afternoon everybody.
When approached to speak in my capacity as a corporate sponsor I was fairly reluctant to commit for 3 reasons really. One; because I was worried the promotion of plastic grass amid an exploration of the beauty of the new perennial movement might not be entirely appropriate. Second; because of the (not unusual, year after year) clash with the Ireland vs Italy rugby match. Here I ad-libbed a bit admonishing Gerry Daly, who I used to play rugby with in Wanderers in the late 1980’s, for not using his influence as a founder member of the GLDA to change the dates. I went on to say I had even heard a little bird ( Ingrid Swan … see what I did there? … never mind) on the committee say they had been concerned with a clash with Snowdrop week. Ah lads. I then proposed an alliance between snowdrop aficionados and rugby fans to lobby for a change in future years. But I digress.
The third reason for being reluctant to speak is because I’m a bit lazy.Well, I’ve the rugby recorded and I figured talking about synthetic lawns might bring some semblance of variety to the day. That still leaves laziness. Soooo, I’m not going to try to sell today or go on about features/benefits etc., or even its environmental credentials. Instead, I thought it’d be much easier to flick through some photos – we’ve thousands on the web site – to show you what Sanctuary Synthetics is all about.
Blah, blah, my background, blah, here’s lots of Ugly ‘before’ pics, blah. Life changing moment … an ounce of commerce is worth a tonne of work. Blah …
I remember my first show in 2002 I think, in the RDS Ideal Homes Exhibition, where lots of people walked past laughing! Well, I remember a similar reaction in the audience on the late late show with gay Byrne (shouldn’t Ray Darcy take over from Turbridy?) when the concept of Ballygowan was first introduced.
Then followed a slide showing the giant Earls court building, hosting their Ideal homes expo in London entirely covered in synthetic grass. (I didn’t say ‘who is laughing now?!’, although I was tempted).
But I persisted, and we are now the proud installers of hundreds of gardens blah, blah … indeed some designers in this very room are customers. But don’t worry I won’t name names.Thing is i believe in what we do. Im just here to try to decriminalise synthetic grass.
Look, it’s simple a practical solution for suburban families with limited space, kids and dogs. Blah. It’s becoming more mainstream.
We find many domestic customers come to us depressed by their gardens. Ashamed almost. (remember the ugly slides, queue the before/after pics). We give them their outdoors back. Then there is at least some chance people will actually do a bit of gardening.
To finish I want to show you (queue pics of Dragons Den & Bloom gardens) how it has certainly allowed me to have lots of fun whilst pretending its work. Blah … and now you know where to come if you are ever tempted to come over to the dark side.
Thank you.
Slan mark
End 🙂