How does one retailer juggle more than 40 suppliers?
Cooks & Company says it's the largest independent premium appliance retailer in the UK, but how does it juggle relationships with more than 40 suppliers at once?
If you can name a premium appliance brand available in the UK, chances are, Cooks & Company sells it.
Walking through the frankly breathtaking 20,000 sq ft showroom space, visitors can see almost the entire alphabet of big names from across the luxury appliance sector, with everyone from Aga to Wolf on display. The retailer considers itself to be the largest independent premium appliance retailer in the UK, and stocks over 40 individual appliance brands, with more coming on board all the time.
“V-Zug is our most recent offering,” Chris Wilburn, design manager, explains, “We’ve wanted to get them on board for ages, but we wanted to make sure we had the space and availability to show it to customers properly.”
Adding V-Zug products to its portfolio is clearly a well-considered decision, but from a retailer with such a long and storied history, you’d expect nothing less. Cooks & Company is now a third generation family-owned KBB business that’s recently passed its milestone 50th year.
According to Wilburn, the company started in kitchens before moving into appliances, and then focused on the high-end price points of both sectors.
“Now we’ve combined the two markets together to be a one stop shop,” he says, “We’ve taken the best bits of all the different sectors that the kitchen world can offer and put it all into one place.”
From the second you step inside the company’s Newark headquarters, it’s immediately apparent that Cooks & Company is a major player in the appliance retail market. Although it contains countless well-thought-out displays, the sheer scale of the building makes it feel more like a modern appliance museum than a simple retail showroom.
Guests are met with an expansive reception desk, in an entrance space lined with Smeg appliances both big and small. Being led on a tour of the showroom by kitchen designer Alexandra Ashley, it’s genuinely surprising to have no idea what brand’s products are waiting around each corner. Each display is so well curated, and they manage to show off the products in unique ways, every time.
For example, towards the rear of the building the Cooks & Co team have created an AGA display zone with a single entryway and a large table in the middle, which feels purposefully staged to “wow” visitors as much as possible.
“We like to bring visitors in here so they can really feel the warmth and impact of these AGA cookers,” Ashley explains, “Sometimes we’ll use the table in the middle of the room to host dining events in here, so that people can understand how they can be heat sources as well as just built-in ovens”.
In an adjacent room, there’s an Everhot display that makes a real visual impact by contrasting colourful cooker models with even more colourful cabinetry, which really draws the eye.
All of this to say, each and every display seems to abide by a central philosophy, which according to Wilburn, is: “If you’re going to use valuable retail space to show these brands off, you have to do it respectfully and give the brand all the opportunity to be able to shine as they should do.”
Forward thinking
Even with all the showroom space being so well-utilised already, Wilburn is still thinking about what comes next in terms of displays.
To help best showcase the new V-Zug appliances, during my visit, Cooks & Company was putting the finishing touches on its upcoming Eggersmann display, set to open this September. The space will also serve as a live cooking demo for a collection of Gaggenau appliances.
Wilburn says: “We’re really fortunate because we’ll be the only showroom in the country with those Eggersmann products on display. We’ll be exclusively displaying a skywalk island from them, but it’s taken a long time to develop and get the design perfect.”
Aside from the phenomenal showroom space, I’m also interested in hearing about how Cooks & Company handles its relationships with suppliers. The supplier-retailer relationship has been a major talking point within the KBB industry over the last few months, so how does the business manage to juggle so many at once?
Cooks & Company is big enough to have its own dedicated team of five appliance specialists, each of which has a list of dedicated brands they deal with.
“Our appliance specialists have 120 years of total experience between them. They know every single model number, every single variation of that product, and they know enough about kitchens to speak to clients,” Wilburn says.
“We run very lean. For how busy we are, we are a very well-oiled machine that doesn’t need an awful lot of people to do a very good job. We don’t expect our team to be masters of all – that’s why we have dedicated teams that specialise predominantly in specific fields.”
Wilburn tells me the idea of the team being specialists in certain areas is expected of everyone in the business, including himself: “I’ve been in the building industry since leaving school at 16, so I’ve pretty much been in and around kitchens all my life. I know kitchens better than anybody, and I know enough about appliances, but when we pool the whole team together that makes it very cohesive.”
With its well-honed team, Cooks & Company is clearly set up to keep adding new brands to its portfolio forever, if it wants to. But with so many companies under its wing, how does it manage those suppliers who expect a degree of exclusivity from their retailers?
According to Wilburn, this is all down to understanding the essence of each brand, and carefully selecting how they all fit together, from its long-serving suppliers like Miele and Lacanche, to its newer brands, like V-Zug. He explains: “We hand-pick brands that have specialist purposes, so we don’t have an issue with recommending brands and products specific to clients where they specialise and excel.
“For refrigeration, Liebherr, Sub-Zero, Gaggenau and Fisher & Paykel are the four that we tell customers are brilliant at what they do. They’ve all got different price points, and they don’t really cross over with clients. Fisher & Paykel’s offering is at a very different price point to something like Liebherr, for example. It’s all about respect – we respect the products and we respect the brands.”
Legacy
It should be an almost impossible challenge to create a showroom space featuring this many suppliers, but it’s hard to overstate how well everything works together. In fact, Cooks & Company is so confident in its understanding of the appliance sector, that Wilburn says one of his main goals is to turn the idea of what an appliance centre is on its head entirely.
“You’ll walk into a lot of appliance places and they’ll have huge ranges of everything there and they end up duplicating what their offering is,” he says, “Whereas we are very specific with the products that we put on display. You can demonstrate to customers about what the whole range of a brand’s products can do, without necessarily having their whole range on display to do it.”
Speaking of displays, only part of the building’s footprint is even used for showroom space. The rest is all storage for the huge quantities of stock the business has at all times.
Another unique selling point of Cooks & Company is its age and longevity. According to Wilburn, this legacy helps maintain the overall culture of the business, and it’s one of the reasons behind its continual success.
“We’re not chasing sales; nobody here is commissioned-based. Everyone here is here to do a good job,” Wilburn says, “We try to build a culture where the people who work here really do want what’s best for the clients. I think a lot of places might say they do the same, but they can be very money-lead. Meanwhile, we’re a 50-year-old business with history behind us, so we can afford to be honest.”
Ambitious plans
Despite stocking the most premium brands available on the market, Cooks & Company doesn’t discriminate over its customers. “Most of the work we complete are projects worth between £70k and £300k – that’s our general client, but it really varies. You could come in here and buy something as miniscule as homeware accessories, or you could come here to a £2.5m refurbishment on your house,” Wilburn says.
“I think what I’m most proud of is that we don’t turn our noses up at anybody. You’ll find a lot of retailers who only want to do £60k-£70k kitchens, and if you have a smaller budget, they’ll turn their nose up and show you the door. I don’t critique people often, but when times get tough and the market starts to dwindle, it’s companies like that which will start to suffer.”
“Whereas we’re not like that. I’d love to work with anyone who’s as passionate as we are. If they’re not, and they can’t afford us, I’ll still advise them on how they can achieve what they want.”
And that doesn’t just apply to kitchens either – Cooks & Co also retails living spaces like boot rooms, bars, cinema rooms and living rooms.
“Where we’re located – this is quite a heavily agricultural community,” Ashley tells me, showing me a living room display on a tour of the showroom, “So we have this display in a country-look style to get people who come in for kitchens or appliances to think about the rest of their homes, too.”
Wilburn elaborates: “We’ll also work with interior designers and even sell them things like paints and wallpaper. They could come in for sofas, barstools, beds – you name an interior item, and nine times out of ten, we’ll sell it. And if we don’t have it in the showroom then we have access to it.”
The latest living space that the retailer is looking to seriously branch into is outdoor kitchens. During my visit, the team are putting the finishing touches on an outdoor display which features Big Green Egg appliances combined with a kitchen that the retailer has manufactured itself.
“I couldn’t find a company that made the kind of outdoor kitchens that we wanted, so we’ve made it ourselves,” Wilburn explains: “and that’s a product that I’ve been building for the last year. People charge an absolute arm and a leg for outdoor kitchens, and the quality for it often just isn’t valid, so with us directly making it ourselves, we can make the quality better, and the offering better at a more affordable price.”
“We’re dipping our toes in this summer and just seeing what the clients are interested in, and then we’ll spend the next Winter evolving the product range and offering. We’ll re-release that next summer after this year’s feedback.”
And despite already redefining what an appliance centre can be, the Cooks & Company team has ambitious plans to take things even further.
Wilburn muses: “We’re constantly evolving and trying to get ahead of the trends. We want to be able to work as a sort of national design centre. Interior design is all over the UK, so one of my goals is to team up with interior designers and make this into a one-stop-shop for them. They want to offer their clients the best knowledge in the industry, so we’re going to prove that we’re the company they should team up with.”