News profile // Daryl Barker
How has business been for Bagnodesign and Sanipex Group over the past year? Despite what’s been happening here in Dubai in recent months, we’ve actually been having a good time. Last year our financial results showed 15% growth both for the whole Group, and 16% growth for Bagnodesign as well. In the UK, our business was a bit flat last year because we were re-organising things, but we developed new products that really helped to boost us down the line. We introduced the Carlyle and Fonteyn ranges, which are very premium, and they’ve helped take us up to another level, and generate a big success in the second half of 2025. And this year, despite what’s been going on in the news, we’ve actually had a
tremendous increase in business. For instance, a lot of hotels, restaurants and shops here in Dubai are renovating now during the quieter period we’re having. So that’s helped us, and by September, fingers crossed, everything will be fine again. We carry about £40m of stock here, so we have a big advantage by having products available even with everything that’s happened this year. It’s a bizarre situation, and we planned for the worst, but as of the end of April we were about 35% up on last year here in Dubai. And this year, our UK turnover is up by almost 50%, so things are looking quite healthy at the moment.
News profile Daryl Barker
Earlier this year, when Dubai became unexpectedly caught in the crossfire of the Iran war, Sanipex Group-owned Bagnodesign had to act quickly to protect its staff and business. With things now much more under control, Sanipex Group CEO Daryl Barker explains how the team maintained business as usual.
Interview: George Dean
How have you had to adapt the business because of the conflict in the region? The situation happened just a few days before KBB Birmingham this year, and although I was supposed to go, I had to cancel my trip to the UK at the last minute. We really didn’t know what was going to happen. I was very insistant that we should close all of our showrooms for the first day, but then on the second day, we had customers knocking on the doors asking to come in, and we ended up being quite busy. There’s something about Dubai where people just want to carry on. There’s a spirit of defiance to what’s happening. It’s a challenge, and we’ve had to start doing a lot of air freighting, which was possible
because we had a lot of stock and a good relationship with Emirates, We normally ship 100-120 containers a month by sea, and in April we only had 59, but because we’re air freighting a lot of it, it’s not been a problem for supply – we have a great logistics team. We’re not looking at the margin at the moment, we’re really focused on servicing our customers, and then the margin will bounce back once the problem goes away.
Where do you think Bagnodesign sits in the market? We consider ourselves to be a premium brand, and a huge part of our turnover comes from our brassware. So Bagnodesign is around a £70m business, and around 60% of that comes from brassware and showering. I think whatever part of the market you look at, the big Germanic brands have reduced their prestige, and they’re becoming very much the middle-market now and very installer-led. Whereas the Italian brands are the premium brands now. I wouldn’t necessarily say we sit at the level of Gessi and Fantini, but definitely between them and the Germanic brands.
How important is the UK market for your overall strategy? We opened our first UK showroom in 2010, but it’s probably fair to say we didn’t always manage the market very well at certain times in the past. We had a change of strategy just before Covid, but Covid ended up disrupting things and we moved into distribution. Roughly three years ago we relaunched our brand directly to the retailer. We don’t supply directly to the consumer, and we don’t have an online presence either. So we’re looking to really support partner retailers and contract merchants. We’ve now got over 100 retailers in the UK, and we’ve got a good team with good leadership here too. Of course, the market is challenging, but we need to make sure we’re carrying on as usual, because there’s a good market with the quality independent retailers. That’s why we’re also investing heavily to support the UK market at the moment, and we’ve uplifted the stock levels significantly.
What can we expect to see from Bagnodesign over the next year? We’ve got a very clear path in front of us. At Clerkenwell this year we launched our new Ginza product (pictured) – I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan in the last
couple of years and that’s very much inspired by the architecture there. As a business, we’re also expanding further into Europe, opening logistics centres in Holland and Italy, and we're expanding into Asia as well. But to put it simply, we’re very focused on growing in Europe over the next 18 months. kbbr
10 kbbreview August 2026
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
