One of the showroom’s largest displays demonstrates the current trend for ribbed panelling


Phillip Ozorio on...


The multiples… “One of the biggest changes I’ve seen during my time in the industry is how the national retailers have developed. They’ve all come a long way, in terms of production and everything else. While we’re generally targeting a different customer to them, I think it’s short-sighted to dismiss them.”


Finding the right staff… “It has always been important for us to employ people with interior design experience, simply because of the level of training they need if they don’t. When we employed people with no interior design experience, I found that I was spending my time training them up and not lead- ing the business from the front and that didn’t work for us. That said, you can sometimes just get lucky with people even if they don’t have the experience or degree.”


Charging for design… “We have a retainer fee that we ask for once we’ve done the first design and the budget and that fee enables us to take the project further. So, we don’t call it a design fee it’s more about ensuring we all want to work together. We’d love to call it charging for design, but unless everybody does it’s tricky to. It would need to be a national strategy for it to work.”


Sub-contract vs employed fitting teams… “Kitchens are like buses…you wait for a while for one and then three come at once. This makes it tricky to employ full-time fitters because we do have quiet periods. We have two subcon- tracted fitting teams, and it all works because we’ve worked together for such a long time. Getting the fitter right is so important. If you don’t, it can cost you recommendations but ours are great and we have the 42 5* ratings on Google to prove it.”


> September 2024 kbbreview 59


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