This month Tim Wallace spoke to Gemma Crook of Wadebridge Kitchens in Cornwall

I get up around 7am but my husband Tristian is normally out earlier to organise the day's fittings. Our deliveries can be from 7.30am onwards and go straight to site. So it's normally a case of me coming down to the store to open up.
We're a husband and wife team; Tris fits the kitchens and I design them and run the showroom. We've been going for three years. Mum tends to cover for me if I'm off and we have a lad that works with Tris on the fitting.

I'm normally here about 8.40am and the first job is to open the post. Then I look through any appointments before starting on designs. Sometimes I give the customer a call to make sure I've got all the information I need and they're getting what they want.

I've always been interested in design - but ended up as a qualified dispensing optician! Then I met Tris who's fitted kitchens for years, so when we moved down here we thought we'd give it a go.

The showroom is just off Wadebridge high street down a side road but we advertise in the local paper and get a lot of referrals. We don't charge for our designs and it's a free measure. Customers probably take our drawings to other stores sometimes but that's life. Hopefully we can provide more than just the drawing; we provide a service as a family team and they get a bit more out of it. You have to provide a good service to keep people happy. Our two main rivals down here have gone out of business; in one case their suppliers let them down. But because we were here first our reputation has gone round and we've hung on.

Show time
At the moment we're getting ready to display at the Royal Cornwall Show. It was extremely successful for us last year and probably gives us about 40% of our business. It's hard work but worth it. Our overall turnover is around £425,000. It's going up year-on-year but I couldn't tell you by how much.

Our main supplier is Theobalds with Matchmaker; we supply about 20 kitchens and a full range of doors. They also supply most of our appliances - brands like Smeg but also people like MWD. We like the quality of their product and they also do what they say they're going to, which is not always the case with suppliers.

During the morning I'll also show customers round but we're not flooded with people so most of the day is designing and pricing up and keeping control of what's happening on-site. We get maybe two or three couples a day which for a two-man team is busy enough. We tick by and enjoy what we do. During the day I tend to get absorbed in the design side and lose myself in it. I try to put myself in there and see how I'd work. I think customers like a woman designer; you tend to think of things a man wouldn't necessarily come up with.

The afternoon will be a case of booking fitting dates and checking payment schedules, but that all stops if someone comes in. I sit down with a checklist of what they want and we go from there. Our customers tend to be older people who know what they want quality wise. It's not so much a look they want as a practical working kitchen. We mainly do farmhouse kitchens, cottages and 40% of our work is holiday homes in places like Rock. Some of those can be quite lucrative.

Average spend is between £10,000-£20,000, but the most expensive was £38,000. We fit nicely between the flat pack and the handmade. What's popular down here is lots of cream, also light oaks in a shaker style. We don't follow the London trends; people down here go for the cottage look with Agas but all the mod cons.

Team work
Towards the end of the day I'll check my emails because I get a lot from people with second homes who don't live down here. They leave a bit of trust with us. I don't see much of Tris during the day, which is probably a good thing! We have a good working relationship though. We tend to meet up for half an hour in the evening before he goes out on his appointments. He's usually back by about 8.30pm.

I close the store about five and then it's home to the children for tea. We open on Saturday morning but not Sunday. Many of our customers are retired so they tend to be able to come in during the week. The evening normally ends with a glass of wine and just chilling out. Sometimes we chat over the day and get that out the way if we need to, and then we try not to talk about it for the last hour or so.

In our free time, we're normally taking the children off to their ballet classes or whatever, or to the beach because they've just started body boarding. We also tend to get a lot of visitors down here; friends often come to stay so it can be quite hectic.

Wadebridge Kitchens
Foundry House
1 Polmorla Road
Wadebridge
Cornwall
PL27 7NB
Tel: (01208) 813231
www.wadebridgekitchens.com