The OP core is not collapsing, but it is no longer the engine. For most dealers, general office products (GOP) still make up about 80% or more of sales. Yet category growth is anaemic. The UK Office Supplies Market Size & Outlook, 2024-2033 report reveals a 26% decline between 2022 and 2024, with GOP forecast to return to only around 1.6% CAGR through to 2030.
By contrast, professional cleaning supplies are expected to grow by 12-15% per year over the same period, driven by a permanently elevated focus on hygiene post-pandemic. Similarly, catering products (non-food) show solid, though more modest, growth of 3.7-6.5% CAGR through to 2035, with even the most pessimistic models forecasting an outperformance of GOP’s predicted 1.6% growth.
The conclusion is clear: to maintain an attractive top-line trajectory, cleaning and catering must be part of your portfolio. Put simply, success will not come from convincing existing buyers to consume significantly more paper or pens. It will instead come from acquiring new customers with adjacent, growing baskets – and cleaning and catering are the most accessible and scalable categories for dealers today.
Barriers are disappearing
Before moving into the heady world of cleaning products, I worked in catering equipment. Towards the end of my time in that sector, I served on the senior team at the Nisbets-owned Uropa Brands. Back then, our world and the workplace supplies world barely touched. We had never heard of VOW Wholesale, Exertis Supplies or EO Group because those ecosystems did not collide.
That is not the case now. The recent tie-up between EO Group and Uropa is a testament to the convergence. When I was at Uropa, more than 1,000 dealers were actively buying catering products. I would be amazed if more than 1-2% of those overlapped with the 1,000-plus traditional OP dealers supplied by wholesalers in our channel. That gap represents a clear greenfield opportunity.
As the walls come down, a new playing field opens. Those dealers that act first to extend their reach will capture a disproportionate share. Win the historically retail- or Amazon-focused buyers with cleaning and catering, then layer on the category you already know best: GOP.
I won’t go into too much detail here on entering these categories – perhaps I can convince the Workplace360 team to give me another slot for that! – but it’s as simple, and as complex, as defining a core range, developing a proposition within your business and aligning your sales and marketing activities behind it.
For now, here are some basics so you don’t have to learn the hard way. Three pitfalls to avoid:
- Treating cleaning like another paper line. It is outcome led, not just price led.
- Launching too wide. Depth in the right SKUs beats breadth you cannot support.
- Overlooking the ‘install’ value on catering products. Coffee and sundries follow a similar sales cycle to cleaning. However, the wider basket of catering items (tableware, tea/coffee-making equipment, etc) offers the potential for a large ‘install’ value that could equal a year’s worth of cleaning products, or more.