RETAILER PROFILE | Birkdale Kitchen Company
chosen as kbbreview’s Kitchen Showroom of the Year for 2022.
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Eye-catching displays give way to more wow-factor room sets, presenting a wide variety of combinations of furniture, worktops and lighting to inspire customers with options they might never otherwise have considered without seeing them. That Birkdale Kitchen Co should have won our Kitchen Showroom of the Year award this year is all the more impressive when you realise that owners Neil Gokcen and Steve Dunne did not open the showroom until April 2021 and that Gokcen himself had never worked in the KBB industry before. Gokcen recalls his reaction to their win: “Not being from the industry, I didn’t appreciate the scale of it. I remember when we were nominated, we had a lot of people call to congratulate us, but it also opened up a whole new world of other suppliers who were keen to gain access to the showroom. It has been very good for our profile.”
Although Dunne had been fitting kitchens for the best part of 15 years and had two or three showrooms of his own in the past, Gokcen came from a telecoms and IT sales background, having worked for Virgin Media, EE and BT. But, he confides, he really didn’t like it very much.
Gokcen recalls: “I thought ‘well, what do I want to do?’ Then I learned of a kitchen showroom that was going to open the other side of the railway tracks from here, but it didn’t open as they went bust and it’s now a café. But it made me think… ‘kitchen showroom’. “I mentioned it to my friend Steve [Dunne], who said that if we found the right location, he’d be up for it. Then we found this, which used to be a Laura Ashley clothing shop. And to cut a long story short, we managed to get the premises and it has been so good for us.”
And the partnership has worked well out for the guys, who each bring their own complementary skills to the business.
“Steve is brilliant at designing,” says Gokcen. “He has a really good eye and he is fantastic with people. Most of the sales and designing and problem-solving on jobs is handled by Steve. I do some designing now, but get more involved with the marketing, finances, logistics and the back end, making sure it is all running efficiently and smartly. Being from outside the industry, I am always asking question after question about what we are doing to make sure we are making it as good as possible.” But what is also unusual about the showroom, and the reason I am paying them a visit for this issue – where our product feature is dedicated to connected living [pages 54-58] – is their decision to have a separate smart-tech room where they could demonstrate the connected capabilities of appliances and other products, such as lighting.
After fixing me up with an excellent coffee from the built-in coffee machine in one of the main displays,
66 · October 2022
s soon as you cross the threshold and enter the Birkdale Kitchen Company showroom, it is obvious why they were
It was just a year after Birkdale Kitchen Company near Southport opened its doors for the first time that it won the kbbreview Kitchen Showroom of the Year award. Chris Frankland visits co-owner Neil Gokcen to ask about that and find out more about their dedicated ‘connected’ room
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