Adrian Gillman interview Labour of love
Industry stalwart Adrian Gillman has been the driving force behind D.A.D and as the company celebrates its 30th anniversary, he tells Simon King of his pride in how the business has developed over the last three decades
A
drian Gillman’s foray into the electrical industry started as a 15- year old when his father, John, sent him down to Lec Refrigeration in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, with the aim of him becoming a refrigeration engineer. John was a self-taught fridge engineer and he wanted Adrian to get City & Guilds in refrigeration, which he duly qualifi ed for, at the end of the week-long course. “I passed the course – even though I couldn’t drive – so someone had to drive me around,” Adrian recalls. “That Lec course was great as it taught me how to weld, how to do electrics, how to gas a fridge and how to braise; it was a really intense course and a really good stepping stone.” Working with his father, the company took on a Zanussi franchise, which was an independent brand at that time. Adrian worked with Alan Stewart, who was the service director at Zanussi. “I was going all over the place repairing Zanussi products – I covered four counties for Zanussi,” Adrian says. “When I was 18, my father died, which was
probably the biggest shock of my life, and it was a massive turning point in my life.” Adrian fondly remembers an early claim to fame that he achieved. “Zanussi sent me down to Bristol University, which had developed a fridge- freezer called the Super Chill, which was way before its time,” he says. “I did a modifi cation to that product because it was breaking down in the fi eld. I resolved the issues with it and actually was highly recommended by Alan Stewart at that time for doing the technical modifi cation to that product.” At the age of 26, Adrian was calling on
retailers and repairing their display product or their exchange products. “I got to know all these retailers across
the four counties and I picked up from them that there was a lack of supply from distributors, unless you spent X amount of
D.A.D Special | March/April 2022
Pounds with a manufacturer,” Adrian says. “They wouldn’t give you a direct account and the distributors in the market at that time didn’t carry a lot of stock, didn’t know what stock they were holding and didn’t know how to sell it – we could do a better job, or certainly a more effective job, than the companies like BDC, Inmans and the HI Group.”
That heralded the start of D.A.D Adrian says: “We started off with a 3,000sq ft warehouse in Woodrow Way, Gloucester, where we stayed for two years; and then moved to a 70,000sq ft warehouse on the Madleaze Industrial Estate – I wondered how we were ever going to fi ll it, and how we were going to have enough money to buy the stock.”
D.A.D stayed at Madleaze for 10 years and Adrian concedes that the business was probably there longer than it should have. D.A.D then we moved to Mill Place, still in Gloucester, which gave the business another 30,000sq ft. In December 2010, the business moved
to Tewkesbury, which represented a signifi cant investment. The unit was previously a cold store for the Somerfi eld supermarket chain. “It took us three months to rip the cold store out,” Adrian says. “Staff were relocated to the new facility on January 2, 2010; they were shown their desks; the computer system was fi red up, the phones rang and off we went.”
As well as being home to the D.A.D head offi ce, the most prominent feature of the Tewkesbury site is the 155,000sq ft warehouse.
“The day we moved into this building was a wow factor for me and I think it was a wow factor for the industry,” Adrian says. “By that time, some of our competitors were drifting away.”
The white goods industry While technology has changed 100% in the
last 30 years, the basic fundamentals of what we do hasn’t.
Adrian says: “For retailers, having a
product in stock is 90% of the sale. “We buy a fridge to refrigerate, and we buy a laundry product to wash – that defi nition hasn’t changed over the years. I think this is one of the most stagnant industries really because technology has improved in cooling, laundry and refrigeration, yet, fundamentally, they still do exactly the same thing.”
Looking ahead, Adrian says that price
increases across the board are coming from May 1.
In 2021, D.A.D grew 8%; this year started
well with the business up 9% in the fi rst two months. “I think March will be a slightly tougher month to be fair than February and everyone says, this industry is still riding high and I disagree with that as there is a shortage of domestic appliances,” he says.
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