Business check | RETAIL
Webbs of Kendal Ben Monaghan, managing director
We’ve been quite busy since the credit crunch. We’ve grown year on year since and there’s no sign of us slowing down. I think we’re in a bit of a bubble here. I know that projects in London have been mothballed and the market has slowed, but for some reason we’re not too affected. It’s a very unique area. Tourism is very strong – it’s a great heritage site. All of these things make it a very attractive place to live. So we’re getting people moving up from London who can get a bit more for their money and so they’re spending more on kitchens. I work with a few architects and there is lots of building work going on and they seem to have very good links to London. We’re doing lots of jobs for people from the area or who have second homes there. That said, people are more cautious – they want value for money and they’re not so quick to splurge. We do advertising and marketing and we have a branding and marketing company that looks after us. Together, we came up with a campaign based around our customers, because I was sick of seeing glossy adverts with massive kitchens in, as I felt most people couldn’t relate to that. So we photographed some of our customers in their kitchens and had quotes from them talking about the elements they liked the most, and we did a double-page spread in the local glossies. Thinking about how our suppliers could improve their service – we’ve just been over to Germany to visit Häcker and that’s a brand that is genuinely always trying
We’re getting people moving up from London
to improve its service for its customers and you really do feel like part of a family. We feel we get a lot of support from them and the way Germans do business is a bit different. You’ll send an order and they’ll go through it and pick it apart and ask questions to make sure you have what you need.
District One Simon Byrne, director
Alexander & Sancto Shaun Ellison, director
We’re quite cautious about what’s going to
happen next year
We’re up on last year, but we’re quite cautious about what’s going to happen next year, given the current political situation [as of the middle of October]. We only opened the bathroom side of the business a few years ago and have been developing it over that time, so that accounts for our growth. Even though it was a brand new showroom, we’ve probably changed about 75% of the displays and are just trying to give our customers what they want. Average spend on a bathroom from us, supply only, is £5,000 to £7,000. We do little to no advertising. We’ve built up a good reputation over the past 20 years we’ve been in business on the kitchen side and we get lots of recommendations. It’s a great bathroom showroom. We are going to be doing some advertising at some point, but we wanted to be able to walk before we could run with the bathroom side. We’ve got one full-time and one part-time designer and I didn’t want to throw them in at the deep end.
The main challenge we’ve faced is actually being recognised as a bathroom retailer. People thought we just sold tiles. But over the past 12 months that has been changing and people are beginning to have more confidence in us as a proper bathroom showroom.
In terms of Brexit and how it might affect us, we import tiles direct from Europe, but the bathroom product mostly comes from the big UK distributors. How resilient the distributors are will be a big factor for us. If you have a distributor who is financially unsound, or has problems in the supply chain, those problems will trickle down to us retailers. So we’re keeping a close eye on that. Regarding how our suppliers could improve their service to us, I would say, just do as you’re saying you’re going to.
December 2019 · kbbreview 67
Business is very good. We’re up around 30% on last year. We advertise hard and we do a very good job. We pride ourselves on our customer service and that tends to show through with recommendations and referrals and so on. We advertise online via Google Ads, on Facebook, and also in Cumbria Life magazine. The reason we advertise as much as we do is that we’re on an industrial estate, so get no passing foot traffic at all. So, if we didn’t advertise, I think we would struggle. We actively seek out more niche brands that aren’t available online as much as possible. You go in to a lot of bathroom showrooms and they have almost exactly the same kit as their competition down the road, so they find it hard to differentiate. In addition to the brands we sell, we back everything up with the customer service. As for suppliers, I think it’s important they do what they say they will – when it comes to lead times. Duravit is a good example.
They’re a massive brand and though you might not like the lead time of eight weeks, your order will arrive when it should, so we can manage this. We do have some concerns over Brexit because we import around 80% of the tiles we sell directly from factories in Italy. Our tile collection is also something that
We seek out niche brands that aren’t as available online
sets us apart. But we’ve got all the right licences in place now and we’re doing anything we can in case of a no-deal Brexit. Ultimately, Europe will want to continue to trade with us and we will want to trade with them, so I think there will be teething problems but that these will be ironed out over time.
The shipping agents are panicking because they will have to pick up the slack – they might have to pay VAT as soon as the product lands in the UK, so I think there may be transit delays.
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