Keith Myers | THE KBBREVIEW INTERVIEW Keith Myers, director
eith Myers is a man constantly balancing two seemingly opposing aspects of his personality. His logical and rational side sees his now award-winning showroom The
K Myers Touch plan with follow a an
impressive and structured business
highly
effective use of IT. However, the other side of Myers’s nature reveals him to be an incredibly creative and empathetic designer who prides himself on truly understanding the emotional resonance with his clients. There is a distinct philosophical approach to The Myers Touch that places tangible value in defining not just what the business needs to do to make money, but what its overarching purpose is.
But it is the pragmatic side that wins in his disarmingly reasonable
assess-
One of the displays in The Myers Touch showroom
November 2021 ·
ment of how it felt to take home the Kitchen Retailer of the Year trophy at the kbbreview Retail & Design Awards 2021 after being a finalist for several years. “One thing that I’ve learnt over the years is that if you’ve made the final you really have already won because it’s a very, very competitive award to get. When you look at the people that have consistently been up for Kitchen Retailer of the Year, they’re all phenomenal businesses. This com - petition is stiff and it’s always very close, so when you do actually hear your name, it is a moment of shock.” It’s safe to say that Keith Myers has been on a very personal journey since he, in his own words, ‘stumbled’ into the kitchen industry. He trained as a design engineer in the electronics sector and spent 12 years with Sun Microsystems before happily taking
voluntary redundancy.
“I didn’t really enjoy it,” he said. “I was more interested in people or what things did rather than how they did it. But it meant that I could bring that experience, that knowledge and that background, into the KBB industry. A practical example of that is when we first went into lockdown. All of my IT systems were already set up and we just basically picked up our computers and phones, went home and plugged them in and they worked.”
All the finalists for Kitchen Retailer of the Year are phenomenal businesses, so when you do actually hear your name, it is a
moment of shock Keith Myers, director, The Myers Touch
Innovation The Myers Touch, based in Winchester for nearly 20 years, began as a building company that subsequently switched to the retail of Siematic kitchens when it became clear that it was the design side of the business he and wife Helena enjoyed the most. From there, as Myers puts it, the company has been ‘constantly innovating, adapting, growing and changing’ ever since. That is driven by the desire to truly understand the effect that good design can have, not just on ergonomics, but how the user feels about the space.
Myers says he can trace this philosophy back
to a single moment of epiphany. “It came completely by chance,” he says. “I was in Scotland visiting the Charles Rennie Mackintosh museum where I suddenly began to realise that design is so much more than just boxes and products. After that, our whole attitude and approach to design flipped over and started us on a journey. What we sometimes forget in our industry is that in certain situations we’re creating very emotive, very spiritual, very other-worldly places for people. We’re creating a feeling with our designs and that’s not really
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