The Birth of Chessington Garden Centre’s Christmas Wonderland

Established in the late 60’s, this independent, family owned Garden Centre in Surrey offers an extensive range of plants and gardening products in a dedicated retail setting. Customers can spend the day there, eating in their onsite restaurant and shopping for local and ethically sourced products.

In the late ‘90’s the team transformed a pine log cabin near the entrance into a dedicated Christmas retail destination providing festive inspiration and selling gifts and decorations. Within a few years the demand and popularity for Christmas themed experiences and retail lead to the family extending their festive offering. They decided to install a purpose built Santa’s Grotto, which has now become a popular local family favourite. Each year the team surpass themselves with increasingly spectacular themed Grottos which draw in many visitors from Surrey and further afield.

Getting The Right Santa Team

Envisage have worked with the team at Chessington Garden Centre for five years now. Every year that we work with this client allows us to build on our knowledge of their requirements, expectations and to better understand their core client base.
We were asked to provide a resilient team of four Santa’s to work daily over the busy five week period up to Christmas Eve. Our Bookings Team drew on their extensive experience and knowledge gained from previous jobs to match the right Santa to the job. This task was made easier by the Client requesting their favourite staff from previous years, and the fact that our Santa’s love to work this Client’s event – we always have lots of applicants!
Highlights included the Grotto being a ‘dog friendly’ event (our Santa’s loved interacting with them!) Additionally one of our staff (Santa Chris) is skilled in Makaton (a unique language programme that utilises symbols, signs and speech to enable people to communicate) which meant he was able to offer an inclusive experience to all visitors during his shift in the Grotto!

The Result

A successful festive event again, a satisfied client with happy customers! If you would like to hire a Santa for your festive campaign or event please contact us here…