Moores Furniture Group | SUPPLIER PROFILE
It’s all about relationships
Not only is Moores Furniture 75 years old, but in July it also had its biggest sales month ever. Chris Frankland pays them a visit and talks to group sales director and soon-to- be-CEO Mike Barrett to find out more about its success
M
oores has come a long way from the humble hut where George Moore first set up his joinery business in 1947
to its current hi-tech
600,000sq ft factory in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, where it employs 570 people and manufactures 460,000 cabinets a year.
The company buys in MFC and MDF boards, makes its own doors, has its own spray shop and all the latest CNC machinery it needs to turn all of that into complete, rigid assembled kitchens. It buys in worktops and kitchen accessories from several of its key suppliers. Moores supplies kitchen furniture to private- and pubic-sector house- builders and retail, where it has an
exclusive partnership with Homebase. After a quick factory tour, I sit down
with chief executive-to-be Mike Barrett (pictured). I ask him about that record- breaking month in July. “We saw it across all of our channels,” he explains, “Moores for a long time was owned by Masco – a fantastic organisation. Lots of resources and expertise to draw on, and very supportive of the business. But Moores was always quite a small fish in a big pond – they were an $8.5 billion organisation and at the time we were a £50 million a year kitchen manufacturer in Britain. We did the MBO in 2017. The work we’d started prior to that was a journey of redeveloping the business end to end – our product range and service
proposition, both in terms of delivery, installation, customer service and design. We started that journey in 2016 and we started to see the early benefits in 2017, but the plan was for fast growth, and we saw that over the next few years.
“I think that what we saw in July
2022 was the impact of all the work that had been going on for so long to grow share in our core markets, coupled with our customer base really getting to a level of output now that post-Covid took some time to recover again. We had record sales in our house-building channel, in our retail channel with Homebase and in our public-sector market. “That was quite an achievement and we all celebrated that.”
Key facts l Employees: 570 l Factory: 600,00sq ft l Output: 460,000 cabinets a year now, capacity for 1.2m
l Installations: Around 400 kitchens a week
l Logistics: 30 deliveries leave the factory every day
November 2022 ·
Turnover for Moores at the time of the management buyout in 2017 was £42m, it hit £60m in 2018 and in 2019 it had its record year of £70m. What does Barrett predict for 2022?
“We’ll be somewhere around £73m to £74m this year. Covid played its part in everyone’s business performance and so, in that respect, we are probably a couple of years behind where we wanted to be, but this year will be our strongest sales year since 2009. “It hasn’t all been easy though. The world has changed over the past two to three years and we have had to work hard to overcome challenges driven by a tough labour market and rising input costs.”
Passion
Seventy-five years in business is an achievement for any company. How does Barrett feel about it? “I’ve been with the business nearly 19 years, most of my working life has been at Moores,” he tells kbbreview. “So I have an immense passion and pride for the business. Personally, I am very proud of what the wider management team and all our colleagues have achieved. The company has demonstrated it is a key player in the market.
“It is a real achievement and it only happens through the commitment and hard work of the people who work here and the commitment and support of suppliers.”
He recognises that this success is down to good partnerships. “In 2016, when we set our strategy, partnerships was absolutely one of the foundations of that. We believe you get the most out of a relationship if you share similar values and have mutual goals and are prepared to invest in each other and work together. That’s what’s
43
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 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88
