the BIG interview
Samsung focuses on built-in and looks to grow appliance business in independents
Speaking at KBB in Birmingham, Jonathan Hartley, Samsung UK’s channel manager for kitchen retail, told Simon King that the Korean manufacturer is making great strides in the independent retail sector
A
ſt er two years of the pandemic, KBB gave kitchen and electrical retailers
a chance to reconnect with suppliers and it’s fair to say that among the appliance manufacturers, Samsung’s stand was one of the busiest. Jonathan Hartley, Samsung UK’s channel manager for kitchen retail, said: “We’ve obviously started to come out of Covid, but we’ve had this dead spot of networking for the last two years and I think everybody’s very much in the same boat, we want to reconnect. “That’s why we were at the KBB show to
ensure that we reconnect and start to engage on new products, which we’ve just launched. We realise what the market requires and what it needs and we want to actually make sure that we drive the market harder to get ahead of where we are at the moment.” Mr Hartley said that in the appliance sector, Samsung is already far ahead of where it set goals for the kitchen channel back in 2018. “But we never rest on our laurels and make
sure that we drive ourselves harder to get to that place faster,” he added. At KBB, Samsung unveiled a number of new ideas and Mr Hartley said that Samsung took a signifi cant decision when it came to this range of products; a move that surprised me as he explained what the Korean manufacturer had done. “The easiest way to describe it is we curtailed
everything that we were doing, it worked very well for us, but we realised that we had no synergy from running it as a family,” Mr Hartley said. “The whole product team at Samsung took a
step back to look at what the market required, we listened and had feedback, and we’ve now come out with a platform of series models. “There aren’t many companies that could do that, but Samsung, the fi fth largest brand in
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the world, is able to do that, because we have the economy of scale, we know how to hit the market hard, we know what products the market wants and subsequently, we’ve got the manufacturing capability to do it because we own our factories.” At the Birmingham show, Samsung launched
two new series – series four and fi ve – at show at KBB. “Initially, we’re going to be launching series
four and fi ve, which will hit the market in June,” Mr Hartley said. “Then, in October, phase two – series six and seven – will launch. “The biggest statement that we’ve got is
that Wi-Fi connectivity is not just on the top premium appliances, it’s now being wound right back to series four; so you buy any Samsung
appliance now from series four to series seven, and you will have Wi-Fi connectivity. “While we highlight new functions like air fry and sous vide, the bits that we don’t talk about are all things that come as standard – Dual Cook Flex, where you have that ability to cook with two fans at two diff erent temperatures and the LED touchscreen.” A slight criticism of Samsung, historically, has been the fact that it has numerous models in a range, but those days are numbered. “We’ve actually consolidated the SKU count,”
Mr Hartley said. “A lot of the products that we built in the past had various handles, knobs and clocks; now everything you’ll see is seamless in the way that we actually move from series four to series seven.
MarchApril 2022
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