COMPANY FOCUS: SWIFT ELECTRICAL T
here was never going to be a good time to get a pandemic that caused a countrywide lockdown but for Chris Honer, director of Swift Electrical, the pandemic really was very bad timing indeed. The former managing director of distributor bcg was just coming to the end of his first year as owner of kitchen and electricals distributor Swift Electrical when Covid-19 hit. “Of the many, many things we put into the business plan, a global pandemic wasn’t one of them,” he says. “Some of our people celebrated their first anniversary working for us by going on furlough. That said, we got through the first lockdown and the second one, not only unscathed, but in relatively good shape.” Swift Electrical has been a family-run distributor based in Stoke on Trent selling electrical appliances for the last 43 years. Since buying the business in March 2019, Honer has, apart from dealing with issues of Brexit and the pandemic, spent the past year going through the whole business looking at how it can grow. “Our key customer proposition – our DNA if you like – is that we are a trusted business and are striving to be the best trained most knowledgeable experts that our customers can deal with; we work with key proprietary brands and we stock their core products in depth as much as possible.”
Out of that, Honer says the strategic objective is to become the independent distributor of choice for merchants, kitchen specialist, electrical wholesalers. “We want to do that by delivering excellence through service and availability and we have some great people to make that happen. For 43 years Swift Electrical have been looking after the kitchen specialist and the electrical wholesalers extremely well, becoming the 4th largest distributor in the UK. The sector which I believe we can make a real difference is with independent merchants.”
Not only that, but Honer wants Swift Electrical to be the go-to choose for suppliers as well. “Many distributors end up being pseudo- manufacturers, offering their own brands that they source from around the world. That’s not the way we want to go. As a distributor I want to be the conduit between the manufacturers of proprietary brands and their customers who aren’t big enough to be able to hold their own accounts. We won’t go in and try an undercut a manufacturer’s brand with another one, we will just look after their brand and their customers. “We are not overloaded with brands,” he says. “For sinks we are very much Franke with Carron included from January. At the traditional end we have Shaws of Darwen and in the brassware Perrin & Rowe at the top end, Franke and some hot water taps. From an appliance point of view there’s a good, better, best, offer
MOVING SWIFTLY ON
Distributors occupy the middle ground between large manufacturers and merchants who don’t have direct accounts, but who nevertheless have a need for that supplier’s products. Fiona Russell Horne talks to a long-established distributor, that is turning its gaze upon the merchant channel.
from Amica, to Indesit and Hotpoint through to BSH”
Investments thus far have been into an all0singing, all-dancing telephone system, which allows everyone some of the team to work from home if necessary and which was, therefore worth its weight in gold during the early days of the pandemic. Swift also invested in a route scheduling-based system, which means deliveries and schedules can be flexed according to demand. This will also confirm with customers via SMS alert when their delivery is scheduled, when it’s en-route and when they can expect to receive it. “It’s the same system that is used by many large UK logistic companies, so it really knows how to schedule deliveries to their maximum effect,” Honer says. “We now make the same number of deliveries with 11 vehicles as we did with 18, so there’s a real benefit to us as well. We deliver everywhere twice a week and launching quarter two of 2021 will be the latest update to the website which will allow the
February 2021
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merchant customer to track their delivery.” Honer says that Swift’s merchant strategy is based on conversations during lockdown with suppliers like BSH and Franke. “They all agreed that what they need to get is deeper penetration into more individual branches, so that they can more easily target the White Van Man type of customer, which is hard for them to do by themselves. That’s where we come in. We have created a key line concept to provide an easy buying guide for merchant branch staff, a collection across core suppliers’. This will be backed up by promotional support, in-branch POS and a dedicated campaign” There is a condensed but comprehensive range of SKUs, in an A5 catalogue, while marketing for the merchant sector includes dedicated marketing collateral depending on the channel. Swift has been working closely with the main buying groups to ensure that each merchant customer sector gets something that works for it. “We have also done something similar with electrical wholesalers by becoming a trading partner with ECD for whom we developed a brochure,” he says. 2021 will see Swift Electrical working with the majority of the UK merchant buying groups. “We are putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. That sounds cheesy and it’s easy to say but it’s difficult to do, but we firmly believe we are getting there.” BMJ
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