Jason Helps, sales director, Hoover Candy

What are the major product trends in kitchens?

We have a design centre over in Italy, and usually most design centres have built-in and freestanding lumped together. Built-in is often seen as the poor relation to freestanding as it's a smaller part of the business. We do them separately.
It's multicultural. Italian design is lovely but we also have Japanese and French, so they come up with things related to furniture as that's the main driver. But we also tend to find that it follows car design. White is big at the moment as are bright colours and stainless steel. White glass looks very nice and ceramics are popular.
Black and chrome is doing well for us as well and we have also introduced a sandy colour and a plum colour.

In what areas have you seen most growth?

The nationals are growing. People like Currys and Comet are doing better than we expected and better than they expected. Traditional kitchen channels like the big sheds are suffering a bit more than we anticipated they would. It could just mean that the buying process is taking longer and it does seem to be taking longer.
Kitchen specialists are doing better now and from a consumer's perspective that's a good thing. Kitchen specialists can sell not just appliances but kitchens as well, so the add-on services are much better and they can also provide the after-sales. In the sheds, they just don't have time or the training to do that, so from that point of view it's better to go to the kitchen specialists.

What is your internet policy? How do you protect your retailers?

We're quite careful with our distribution and ultimately everybody's in this to make money. It's hard to sell appliances in the first place so you might as well make money on the ones you do sell. We see massive discounting going on and not just on the internet but other channels as well.
What we've always been quite good at is managing where the product goes. We're going to try to manage the channels with exclusives and it's not an uncommon feature really, but we try to do something different for each of the channels and do it sensibly. We have to recognise the internet as it's a big part of the business, but it doesn't have to be the cheapest.
One of the ways we're lucky - having limited distribution - is that if you're the biggest brand in the world, everybody's got it and everyone can sell it. It becomes about who can discount it most.
Effectively they just keep going until they can't go any lower. We've been quite careful with our distribution, so don't really have that problem. We have some challenges, but nothing in comparison with others.