MIELE: DR REINHARD ZINKANN ERT INTERVIEW


Q: We’re here at Miele’s brand new Experience Centre in Edinburgh. Tell me why these stores are so important to the brand? RZ: These Experience Centres are crucial touch points to offer the feel, smell and touch; it’s the opportunity to explore the product interface, to push the buttons, to see inside, to size things up, and most importantly to understand the quality. We have three ideas behind these stores. Firstly,


we offer demonstrations to anyone who pops in, whether they order dust bags for their vacuum cleaner or a whole new set of kitchen appliances! If they’re in the store, that is a huge plus for us. Secondly, we offer cooking classes and events


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with top class and well-known chefs, and these are booked up months in advance. They can be extremely useful for customers who are thinking about purchasing, but also for those who already own a product and perhaps want to get better skills and make better use of a machine they have already invested in. Thirdly, we say to our retail partners “bring your


customers in”; we believe they will remain long- term customers if they have a truly unique experience and are shown special attention. We do reinforce “it is your business and your customer, we won’t take that away” but it can be very beneficial to provide an extended showroom where some partners might not have the space in their own store to host and demonstrate. To use an example, we opened an Experience


Centre in Düsseldorf last year close to a very big specialised Miele dealer. We discussed how the brand would be so much more visible in the area and how demand will grow, and when I told him he could bring in his customers and book classes and demonstrations for them – yet his customers will remain only his – he was completely convinced. And that is the way we want to work with our


retail partners and why our Experience Centres are extremely important.


Q: And do you have ambitions to grow your network of Centres? RZ: We will definitely open more in the UK and across the world. We have others coming soon in Athens, Seoul and Osaka, but there are many more plans in the pipeline to develop our regional business network. Most importantly for Miele it is a brand


statement. Here in the new district of St James Quarter there is no better place to make a statement about quality and passion for our products alongside some other really high-end brand names.


Q: Your electrical retail partners can offer very similar environments in their own stores, so how important are they to you? RZ: I have always believed that the retail trade, if positioned in the right way, has an excellent chance to prosper; as human beings, we always want to have that shopping experience and therefore we’ll always need places to visit.


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