Interview: Andrew Davies and Simeon Gabriel (in association with Hettich)

Franchising is not a new concept in the UK KBB retail sector, the likes of Schmidt, Ripples, and Kesseler have been around for a long time, not to mention the ‘makeover’ brands of Dream Doors or Granite Transformations.

But there is no question that the rapid growth of Kutchenhaus, backed by German manufacturing giant Nobilia, has catapulted the concept into the mainstream.

Arriving in the UK in 2004, it actually only switched to a franchise model in 2015 and, when a new leadership team took over in 2019, it accelerated growth to the nearly 85 franchisees it has today — with more planned before the end of the year.

There are few who would doubt that Kutchenhaus has become a hugely influential name in the kitchen retail market, so what’s the secret?

Firstly, and obviously, it needs a lot of franchisees and, according to head of marketing Paul Lee, it’s cast its net wide.

“We have three franchise partner profiles that we tend to look at,” he says. “The first one is kitchen designers who have ambitions to run their own business and own their own showroom.

“Secondly, it’s people who are currently independent retailers who want to switch or open a second business, and thirdly it’s the investor, the person who has a good financial backing, are retail savvy, and understand the customer journey but are not necessarily from a kitchen background.”

What makes the franchise model so interesting is the balance between the control and support of the brand and the relative autonomy of the franchisee, so how does Kutchenhaus maintain consistency to ensure that, whichever franchise a customer walks into, the level of branding, service and design is the same?

Consistency

Part of the answer is the Kutchenhaus support centre that will review and help with marketing, design, ordering, project management and any other issues the franchisee may have and it is this back office support that, Lee says, ensures consistency across service and design too. 

“We have a growing support centre, but also a growing field team,” Lee says. “We have regional directors, regional managers and trainers visiting our showrooms up and down the country on a regular basis to support that design consistency. The same goes for service and I actually think that’s a really strong point of difference for us.”

While there is clearly a very strong support network, the real question with Kutchenhaus is what have they done to gain the kind of momentum that other KBB franchise operations haven’t been able to?

“I think it’s the backing of Nobilia,” Lee says. “It’s Europe’s number one kitchen manufacturer, and that gives us a fantastic platform. On top of that, looking at Kutchenhaus specifically, the vision of the leadership of the business is fantastic and also I would suggest the team culture – and that’s not just our support centre and our field team, I’m also very much including franchise partners in that.” 

But while this qualitative argument is very compelling, ultimately there must be a quantitative element too. Put simply, there must be money in it.

“So a strength of Kutchenhaus is the relatively low barrier to entry investment,” Lee says. “There is no onboarding fee to join and, within the first year, your investment level should be somewhere between £80,000 and £120,000 pounds and then in terms of existing business, this year our like-for-like showrooms are up by around 15% compared to the previous year.”

With over 80 showrooms opened in just five years, what are the ambitions in terms of numbers? Lee is understandably cagey when it comes to revealing these kinds of strategic plans, but it’s clear that there is no desire to slow down as it approaches 100 showrooms.

But how far can the mechanics of the model be scaled before that consistency becomes fragile?

“Helping the existing showrooms be successful, that’s critical because we want our current franchise partners to stay with us on this journey and, of course, onboarding new franchise partners who may be coming to us for the first time or, indeed, those that are opening their second, third or fourth showroom.

“Getting the balance of those two things right is our focus as we grow the number of franchise partners and the support network around them. That’s why Kutchenhaus is the best of both worlds.”