This year’s youngest Adopted Retailer, Shotton-based Warrior Bathrooms, has arrived at a unique turning point. Its first year has been, by all accounts, a resounding success, but with that time now behind them, should the team continue on the same established course, or build on their 2025 success with a radically different strategy?

When we last spoke, one of the big changes Craig and Sarah were looking to implement in the new year was updating their displays. Plans are already underway to switch up some of the showroom’s roomsets, with new displays for Abacus, Bathrooms to Love and Scudo now set to debut in the near future.

“We’ve been partnered with Abacus for a little while and we’ve had more people asking about those products specifically,” Sarah explains. “So we’ve taken out the two displays at the front of the showroom, as those two units are being discontinued.”

Despite being a newer showroom that’s still working hard to build up its reputation, and even though it’s no easy task to be swapping out displays at this stage, Sarah explains that they wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting products to clients (in the premium front of showroom spot, no less!) that were no longer on the market.

 “As soon as we know that something’s going to be discontinued, we do make a move to get that replaced,” she agrees. “Because it’s only the two of us, we do have to try and think more practically. In larger businesses, they can just take displays out and have a new one in within a blink of an eye. There’s only really myself and Craig, so we have to choose wisely about who we put in based on what people are buying.”

Radio review

And although Warrior Bathrooms might be refreshing some of its displays already, it’s standing firm in making no swaps to the suppliers in its portfolio. “We’re quite comfortable that we’ve got a good range of different suppliers at the moment,” Sarah explains. “Right now, I’d say we want to keep streamlining and being as straightforward as possible. We don’t want to have reams and reams of different suppliers that are all offering relatively the same product.”

Not that Sarah rules out the possibility of new suppliers either – “If there was something new and wonderful that became available, then it would be something that we would potentially look at, but they’d also have to be products that people wanted,” she adds.

Aside from displays, another change that Craig and Sarah previously said they were considering was a major overhaul of their marketing efforts. In particular, they were reconsidering their previous strategy of running radio ads, and after mulling it over during the Christmas break, they’ve officially decided to pull the plug on that strategy and put their focus elsewhere.

“I’m a little bit of a record keeper, so I like to try and understand where customers find us,” Sarah says. “Is it through a recommendation or word of mouth? Was it something that they saw on Facebook? Unfortunately we found that there was very limited response coming back from the radio ads we were running.”

However, Sarah’s also not ruling out a return to the airwaves down the road either, particularly if the business was looking to run any kind of promotion. Now, the focus is going to be on regional magazines that get delivered directly through the letterboxes of prospective local clients.

And on the digital front, Warrior Bathrooms still maintains an active Facebook presence, as well as continually updating its own website. 

The showroom does have accounts on other platforms such as Instagram, but Sarah explains that she and Craig are slightly hesitant to pool too much of their marketing efforts in that direction, for fear of putting off potential customers with oversaturation.

“Some social media seems to be very repetitive,” Sarah explains. “Usually, it’s the same marketing that pops up. It puts me off wanting to do newspaper articles that go on social media, because often I find when you’re trying to read articles it’s the same pop-ups that appear time after time, and it can become annoying for people. I’d rather be in the newspaper or in a booklet.”

Independent mindset

So, with their hands full with updating the showroom and reconsidering their marketing plans, what’s on the cards for Warrior Bathrooms for the rest of 2026? According to Sarah, she and Craig are making a concentrated effort to focus specifically on the here and now, without trying to get bogged down by looking too far down the line.

“A lot of our discussions at the moment are more around the new trends we’re seeing in the first quarter, then we can put into place some actions for the rest of the year,” Sarah says. “New brochures usually come out in January or February time, suppliers are releasing new things and prices always change at the beginning of year. We’re going to see how those changes impact on what people are leaning towards.”

In fact, now that Warrior Bathrooms has passed the one-year-in-business benchmark, for their second year, the duo say they’re choosing to focus on their own business over listening to the industry grapevine or speculative forecasts about the state of the market.

“One of the things we heard a lot over the last year was that a lot of people said their business was quiet and things weren’t really picking up for them. But we didn’t really see that.” Sarah recalls. “We just kind of stayed steady and didn’t put any big plans into action in case things did quieten down for us. Luckily we ended up being really nice and busy.”

She continues: “We’re the only independent in the local area so we maybe have a different experience to some of the other independents anywhere else in the country. At this stage, the only thing different this year to what we did last year will be our marketing.”

So it’s no surprise that when asked to sum up the plan for the year as a whole, Sarah explains: “Essentially, we’re being conscious to come back to the basics and review the information that we’ve got in black and white rather than trying to listen to what’s happening in the wider industry because that isn’t necessarily what’s happening with us. 

 “We’ve been really surprised by how busy it’s been,” Sarah concludes, “so we’re going to keep that positive momentum moving forward!”