Steve Scogings, md of Stellisons in Essex, gives us a retail perspective of the range cooker market...

Stellisons has been selling kitchens for more than 25 years and we have found that the appliance market has developed significantly over this period. We have noticed that the range cooker has increased in popularity with our customers and this in turn has led us to increase our displays of these products.

We have many different brands on display, as we benefit from having appliance showrooms in which we put our kitchen centres. In recent years, we have seen clients willing to spend more on their choice of range cooker, with more emphasis being put on colour, size, fuel choice and style than on cost.

This is not to say that customers are not price-conscious, the majority that we meet here at Stellisons have trawled the internet to check that the price they are paying is acceptable. These days though consumers are happy to invest slightly more to ensure they get the cooker of their choice.

We also find that more than 75% of our customers are searching manufacturers' websites for ideas before they choose their cooker and have a good idea of what they are looking for before they even visit the store.

Most customers look for a well-known brand but will put a lot of importance on finding a style that will suit their new kitchen, whether this be modern or traditional. We have found that it helps to stock brands that offers the greatest diversity of colour, style, fuel types and size, and because of this we display a large selection of Rangemaster cookers for our customers.

There is a recent trend in Essex for customers to buy more expensive range cookers and this has seen products at the top end of the market taking a larger share of the market. Dual-fuel is still the preferred fuel choice, but induction cooking is now available on some cookers and this has increased sales on the electric ranges.

When it comes to fuel choices, gas is still a small percentage of the market, unless the customer lives in a rural area, in which case we still see good sales of gas and LPG.

There is no significant trend when it comes to size. It is generally left to our designers to get a feel for what size range cooker a client will be most happy with, given the size of the family and house.

We predict that the market will grow slowly over the next six months. There are more and more customers coming to our kitchen showrooms looking to replace an old kitchen as they wish to ride out the so-called credit crunch before they look to moving.

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