MERCHANT FOCUS: KENT BLAXILL
MOVING FORWARDS WITH RAPID CHANGE
Fiona Russell Horne meets a merchant that plans on growing bigger, by getting smaller.
S
ometimes it takes an unusual event to stop you in your tracks and give you the opportunity to re-think your position.
So, it was with independent Essex-based builders merchant Kent Blaxill and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The two UK lockdowns and the way they changed how the merchant business had to operate made the merchant wonder if, maybe, doing more with less would be the right way forward.
“Basically, we realised the efficiency we had to bring in as a result of the Covid pandemic meant that we could probably keep many of them, and still be able to grow the business,” says managing director James Park.
As a result, a planned redevelopment of the company’s huge Colchester head office site will actually make the site smaller, but it will run more efficiently and, ideally, profitably.
“We learned so much about what we as a company can really do during the pandemic that we really want to put that to good use in moving the company forward,” he continues.
The 184-year-old company started out as a paint, decorating and hardware store in Colchester High Street. There are now 22 decorating branches and two mixed
20
merchant sites – Colchester being one and Bury St Edmunds the other – across the south east from Norfolk down to Tunbridge Wells.
Building manager Jason Brightman says that the company’s latest initiative, KB Rapid, was born out of the phone-and- collect service that Kent Blaxill had to implement during the early days of the first lockdown across the branches. “The decorating branches would pop tins of paint outside the doors for customers to pick up, the Colchester and Bury branches had set A B and C collection points. Rather like Argos, but on a bigger scale and with larger, bulkier products,” he says. From this grew KB Rapid, a service which offers the top 250 product lines across heavyside and lightside on a speedy collection service. “You can choose the product, check with us that it is in stock, and then it’ll be ready to collect in 10 minutes.” Currently a phone-based service, a KB Rapid App is being developed which will make it even more efficient. “The idea is that it can then be rolled out to any other branch once we have it up and running properly.” Brightman explains
One of the major benefits for customers will be the convenience, particularly for those who don’t want to order a huge load of items, but rather just a few top-up
goods across a couple of product areas, maybe to finish off a job. “They don’t want to have to trek all the way in and stand in a queue to order their few bricks or half a dozen roof tiles,” Brightman says. “With KB Rapid, they can order, collect and be back on site to finish the job.”
KB Rapid was born from the Covid restrictions, but Kent Blaxill also realised something else during lockdown. That the site is just too big for its needs. “That’s not necessarily a negative thing, but for us, the customer journey could be made so much more effective and efficient and indeed more convenient for those customers if we operated from a slightly smaller site,” Park explains.
Less means more
The plan therefore is to condense the 7-acre site, bringing the warehouses, of which there are currently six, running all the way through the site, down to four, making them more efficient in terms of layout. “It will mean we can store more products than we do now, simply by being more efficient about it,” Brightman says. The site deals with both retail and trade sales, retail being the kitchen and bathroom showroom, the landscaping area and the decorating shop. At the moment they are relatively separate, but Brightman points out that there are trade customers who deal with all these areas as well, plus there are retail customers who like to buy their materials from a merchant. “So, we knew
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net September 2022
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
