special report Best of Best Sellers 2019
As 2019 draws to a close, Housewares Magazine tots up a year’s worth of Best Sellers responses from readers to find out how suppliers - and their products - fared over the past 12 months. Consultant Caroline Rowell casts her expert eye over the results of our exclusive Best of Best Sellers survey.
retailer thinks it’s selling well. We then add up the number of ‘hits’ for each supplier. The company that gets the most citations is declared the overall winner. So, who dominated the list this year? It was good for the market that the top spots were closely contested, with KitchenCraft leading the way, followed by Horwood, Eddingtons, Le Creuset, CKS, Robert Welch Designs, Tradestock, Chilly’s, Emma Bridgewater and JWP.
“Products that tick the eco-friendly box have
doubled in their listings and the number of
different items quoted” As for products, it’s intriguing to see that
This exclusive survey of Housewares Magazine’s regular Best Sellers feature is not a definitive guide to the best-selling housewares products in the UK. But we believe it’s a reasonable indicator of what made your tills ring in 2019. Unlike much of the data from major retail analysts, our statistics come from you, our core readership of independent housewares retailers. And whilst they should not be seen as prescriptive to every business, we believe that the repetitive mention of these products justifies our claim that they are best sellers. The Best of Best Sellers league does not refer
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to either volume or value but is simply produced by asking retailers (chosen at random from across the UK) a simple question: “What are your top 12 best sellers?” There is no further prompting and responses can range from high ticket small electricals to humble items such as potato peelers and can openers. We publish the answers, listing each product, its supplier, price and the reason why the
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s we approach the end of the year it seems relevant to review the Best of the Best Sellers.
there were no standout lines from any category with the exception of Robert Welch Designs’ Signature knives, which seem to have secured a notable hold on the market. Cookware accounted for 11% of the
productsmentioned this year, with Horwood featuring most heavily across its brands Stellar and Judge. Last year Le Creuset was well represented across all its substrates but this year cast iron was only mentioned once, with aluminium and enamelled metalware product arguably taking its place. Induction is clearly
Eddingtons Bee’s Wrap food wraps
impacting on the buying decision process, with a strong representation of Stellar 7000, accompanied by comments on its value for new induction hob owners. For knives, it was encouraging to see that
Robert Welch Designs Signature knives •
HousewaresLive.net
customers are seeking out quality tools from the independent base with an average selling price of £90. Robert Welch Designs leads the field in this category, followed by Grunwerg and Taylor’s Eye Witness. The small electricals sector was far smaller than last year: down 40% on the number of lines quoted. However, with an average price of £191 customers seem to be focusing on specialist cooking tools such as Bamix and Magimix - perhaps implying that the less expensive fashion-led market for appliances such as kettles and toasters is now firmly with mass- market and online retailers? The gadgets sector was marked by its narrow field this year with 25% fewer products mentioned compared with 2018. However, it is still the largest sector in terms of mentions (a single sku might be mentioned more than once). Euro Scrubbies from CKS are still very popular, it seems - but there are distinctly fewer garlic products! It’s hard to see a particular theme to the results; there are a number of vegetable preparation tools but mixed in with them are slightly more novelty products such as a Meow cat & mouse timer from Joie. Overall it doesn’t appear that novelty gadgets are filling the kitchen drawer as they used to. Tabletop accounted for 24% of the reported lines last year. Interestingly, this year it represents 26%. It was encouraging to see new entries sitting alongside more familiar names
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twitter.com/Housewaresnews December 2019
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