Initially, it was expected that the lockdown would damage Primethorpe Paving's business, but the opposite occurred. Owners found themselves working 12 hour shifts to keep up with the volume of orders.

Sales increased by over 100% for some items, including mixed size paving, cobbles, jointing compounds and walling copings and bricks. Overall, sales increased by 114% during lockdown, showing that garden and property improvements were a very popular lockdown activity and that people are willing to spend to support local businesses.

The managing director of Primethorpe Paving said: "We were initially concerned about going into lockdown across the busiest months of the year for a Landscape gardening supply business. We survive on our spring and summer markets, so the timing for us couldn’t have been worse. Or so we thought.

"It seems obvious now, but with people confined to their homes and forced to cancel summer holidays, there was, all of a sudden, a huge demand for home and garden based projects and plenty of budget for people to undertake them. We have never been busier!

"We operated on skeleton staff with the business owners often working 12 hour days, 6 days a week just to keep up with this extra demand and make sure orders were fulfilled while we made sure we protected our staff."

"The team was slowly reintroduced back to full working capacity with only a handful of delayed orders – and never by more than 24 hours. If you told our team the volumes we would end up fulfilling before the start of lockdown, they would have laughed. As it turns out, with a hardworking team following our robust systems, we can handle volumes that we previously didn’t expect.

"We were only held up by stock levels in the end, so now we know the kind of fulfilment levels we can reach, we know there is plenty of room for us to expand into. The future is bright."

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