PROFILE: Arte Form

The Arte of the Matter


Brassware distributor Arte Form has avoided the discounting war in the bathroom market in favour of supplying high-quality European products offering retailers better margins. Tim Wallace visits the company’s Bedfordshire base to meet co-owners Nathan Helms and Mark Livesey

What do bathroom retailers really want from their suppliers? As far as Nathan Helms is concerned, the answer is simple: “They want a brochure and a product that turns up,” he says. “They want something that isn’t supplied to every Tom, Dick and Harry, isn’t in the nationals or Bathstore, and isn’t crucified online.”

With this in mind, back in 2014, Helms and business partner Mark Livesey decided to launch a distribution company offering mid- to top-end brassware with exactly those qualities. Or, as Helms puts it, offering “artisan bread with olives, not just a sliced white loaf”.

Nathan Helms
Nathan Helms

“We felt there was a gap in the market for a well-designed, well-manufactured European product that had some other story behind it,” he explains. “That story is about who designed it and the thought process behind it. Retailers are fed up with customers telling them what the price of their stuff should be – just because they’ve seen a bloke somewhere selling it cheaper.”

A veteran of the bathroom game, Helms and his equally grounded business partner believe they know what it takes to make a product work – even in a sector as crowded as brassware. And as we sit down to chat, they quickly launch into what’s clearly a well-rehearsed sales routine. “In essence, we’re a distributor, but we don’t distribute brands,” Livesey says. “Arte Form is our company name and brand.”

Mark Livesey
Mark Livesey

Offering that elusive ‘something different’ is hardly a new idea, but there’s more to Arte Form than that, they insist. They’re not just another supplier claiming to have found a lucrative niche.

Helms began his bathroom career with an independent dealer in the late ’80s, he tells me, but by 1990 he was out on the road as an agent. He then landed a job with Glen Dimplex, where he met Livesey. The pair have represented many bathroom brands over the years, including Crosswater, Kermi and Kaldewei. More recently they set up Bauhaus Industries, which was subsequently bought by Crosswater in 2008.

“We sold it on the Friday and by the following Monday we were working for them as agents,” Helms laughs. “We had the whole of the South-East for Crosswater, Simpsons shower doors and Bauhaus furniture.”

Flow wall-mounted bath set
Flow wall-mounted bath set

But the decision to set up Arte Form was driven by the fact that they’d never stepped away from the front line – and so had a great feel for the way the market was heading. The race to the bottom had gathered pace, leaving a gap in the market that was too tempting to ignore.

“We decided not to compete with the people who are all about volume and shipping boxes,” Livesey explains. “You can’t always do that and maintain design integrity or quality. Our products are all machined in low-lead and lead-free brass.”

The company takes its environmental responsibilities seriously and its brochures are all made from recycled paper. It also uses UPS to ensure “100% carbon neutral” deliveries.

Toki thermo shower valve
Toki thermo shower valve

But Arte Form isn’t just a distributor, Helms claims. It’s more like a “hybrid manufacturer”. Products are sourced from two factories in Italy and one in Portugal. “But European suppliers find it incredibly challenging to supply direct to the UK market,” he says. “The only way for us to do it properly is to buy it, stock it and ship it. We tell our suppliers they’re almost there, but they need to Anglicise it. And they say: ‘it’s your product, how much do you want?’

“We’re now spending several hundred thousand euros per annum with them, so they’re saying, ‘if you want it, we’ll find a way to make it’.”

Products are aimed squarely at independent dealers, which is very familiar territory for Helms and Livesey. The product “needs a bit of selling,” Helms admits, but the company now deals with nearly 200 retailers, predominantly in the South-East. These include the likes of West One and Richmond-based Original Bathrooms. The plan is to eventually expand to 500 – a manageable figure that they’re confident won’t lead to over-distribution.

Toki hand shower
Toki hand shower

Business is growing steadily, with plans under way to introduce more high-end product to boost turnover.

“We could be doing a lot more, but we wouldn’t have a handle on it,” Livesey says. “We’ve invested a lot of time, effort and money to get to this point. Turnover is about £1 million, but we’re just starting to build. It takes a long time.”

“We want to be the retailer’s friend and put the ownership into their hands,” Helms adds. “We never talk percentages, that was drummed into me by my former guv’nor. Five per cent sounds rubbish, but £178 buys you a nice meal out. We talk in pound notes value, not 30% or 50%.”

So what are the long-term targets?

“Ultimately, national coverage,” Livesey says. “We’ve tried to be cautious and funded it ourselves, we don’t owe anything. It might seem an old-fashioned way to run a business, but we can sleep at night.”

Helms laughs: “But when you do a stocktake and you’ve got 28 grand’s worth of shower heads in the warehouse it focuses the mind a bit. You think, ‘I’d better go and sell some of those.’ We’re exactly the same age and we don’t want three heart attacks by the time we’re 50 from slogging our guts out.”

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