TEN QUESTIONS


DIY Week speaks to Ian Davies, Sales Manager for the Nilfisk consumer division for the UK and Ireland to find out more about the man, the company and its products.


NILFISK CLEANING UP WITH


Please tell us a bit about your company Nilfisk is a 115-year-old Danish company that was founded by Mr Nielsen and Mr Fisker, which is where the ‘Nilfisk’ name originates. They’ve manufactured lots of different things over the years, the first electric vacuum cleaner in Europe came in 1910 and they made lots of floor care products. The company has grown through acquisition, buying various different companies over the years. Nilfisk currently employs around 4,500 people, with over 40 sales companies around the world and we trade in over 100 countries. The main product areas for the UK consumer division are DIY vacs, pressure washers and we’ve also got a combination vacuum cleaner/floor scrubber as well, that vacuums and washes hard floors


Can you tell us about your role? Within the UK, I’m responsible for all P&L and managing all the elements of that, from pricing to distribution and profitability and all the challenges that go with effectively running the UK business. In the UK directly, we are a small team, but we have marketing support from head office in Denmark, logistics specialists, forecasting specialists and we’ve got our customer service team which looks after, not only the consumer, but the professional products as well.


What are your best-selling products? Nilfisk launched the new Core range this year and that’s very quickly becoming our best-selling range in the mid-sector of the market. We design and engineer all our products in Denmark, so they are very stylish and the Core range itself has won quite a number of awards. We also use the highest quality materials and parts available. Our tagline is ‘cleaning made


simple’, so we try and make our machines easy to use, but very effective and we’re focused on quality. All our pressure washers have metal pumps, which does set us apart from our competition and we try and put as much as we can into the product to meet the consumer’s needs.


24 DIY WEEK JULY 2021


What awards has Nilfisk won? We have been really successful in terms of the awards that we’ve won for these products, particularly for the Core range. We’ve won the prestigious German Design award for excellence in product design and also the gardening and outdoor living category for the Core 140 and the Core 140 In-Hand. We’ve also won the Red Dot Design award in the garden category and the IF Design award in the product category. Now additionally to that in the UK, for different configurations and models, we’ve won the Independent Best Buy and we’ve just been awarded the Gardener’s World Best Buy.


How does the range benefit retailers? Fundamentally, retailers are looking for products that perform well and we’ve taken our influences from what consumers need and all the research that we’ve done in developing the product. The marketplace is evolving and changing and Nilfisk is very much a design engineering led company,


so we design and


make these products to meet the consumer’s needs. Consumers want products that are easy to use and simple, but very effective and that last a long time. We also have good points of sale, we’ve got great


packaging that


explains all about the product and what’s inside the box and what you get with the product.


What do you see as your main challenges in the business?


I think the biggest challenge is the unprecedented marketplace we’re in. It has changed beyond recognition from two years ago because of Covid and how people shop is changing, and the big question is, how will that continue in the future? Are we, as a society, going to be shopping much more online than in physical shops and how do we meet those challenges? I think that’s quite a big thing and in the short-term we’re seeing unprecedented demand for our products and a lot of my time is taken up with supply chain, making sure we’ve got the products that we


need to meet the customers’ needs and planning much further ahead.


Do you have any other new products in development? Yes, we’ve got loads. Nilfisk has got a large R&D department and the consumer team and our professional R&D guys work very closely together. We do lots of trying to understand customers and workshops, such as what are people using? How are they using the products? What is it they would like to see in products that they don’t have at the moment? There is always a lot of innovation and that is very much the lifeblood of Nilfisk. It is also a very environmentally friendly company and tries to have a product that is using the least amount of any resources and is recyclable.


How long have these products been in development and what are their USPs? Fundamentally, it’s about quality and quality improvement and we spend a lot of time on that area, making our products more and more reliable. Then there is the part of the business that is making them environmentally friendly, so we can we recycle components within our machines. And of course we want our products to perform really, really well. So, for instance, a few years ago


there was a big project on how do we make the nozzles of our pressure washers better? What’s the best that we can do? And R&D spent ages altering the size and the shape of the whole nozzle, so that when it’s delivering the cleaning impact, the combination of the pressure and the


water, gave the best. So, it’s all about those kinds of things and then it’s about what makes life easier for the consumer to use our products. In the Core range, for example, on the 140s, we’ve got a patented hose reel that keeps the hose neat and tidy, but it’s still very easy to use. We’ve done a lot of work on the high-pressure hoses, one of the challenges of pressure hoses is that they retain memory and curl back up again. So, there’s a lot of work gone into how do we make that better? What materials are out there that maybe are not used at the moment for high pressure washers? How can we utilise those so that it reduces the amount of twisting and turning? How do we design a gun, so that it is more ergonomic for us to use as a consumer? So there are lots of those things that are maybe not massively significant, but improve the product as it goes along, so it evolves into being a better product.


Do you have some input from feedback from customers in the UK to design? Yes, we feed back into the product management team in Denmark and the R&D team, with feedback from our customers. They are also always looking at what people post on the various review websites of what they think of our products.


Going forward, what’s keeping you busy? We’re very much into the middle of planning for 2022 in the shorter term and then we’re looking at what are our ambitions within the marketplace and where do we want to go? Where do we want to take the brand and therefore how do we get there? From a retailer’s point of view, everybody is looking for an easy life and, in effect, wants to deal with companies that are easy to do business with, have the right technologies in place so they can EDI orders and deliveries, etc. If you can tick those boxes for your customers so that you become the go-to manufacturer, you’re halfway to achieving your ambitions.


For more details, please visit www.nilfisk.com/en-gb/consumer


www.diyweek.net


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