It’s very telling that when kbbreview first announced that Alan Dodds was stepping down from Roca UK back in December, congratulations and thanks came from across the sector.

As the former managing director, and then executive chairman, of one of the biggest bathroom suppliers in the UK, messages not only came from fellow board-level executives but also former employees at all levels as well as individual retailers and designers. His skill for the personal touch was unavoidable.

It marks the end of an era that has seen Roca grow into a dominant industry supplier and Dodds grow into an influential and highly-respected industry figure – not that he would ever want it to put it in such grandiose terms. 

Joining the company as MD in 1999, just six years after Roca UK was founded, one of his first tasks was to integrate the recently acquired Laufen into the business and since then the company has consistently achieved year-on-year market growth, despite the peaks and troughs of the sector.

There are many highlights, for example the opening of the flagship Roca London Gallery in 2011, designed by architectural icon Zaha Hadid, and in 2014 Roca UK’s sales of vitreous china exceeded one million pieces for the first time.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In 2001, and still in the early days of his tenure, a fire destroyed the office and warehouse facility in Coalville, Leicestershire. Under Dodds’ direction, the team set up a temporary working office in a local hotel, sourced alternative warehousing and were back up delivering in just a week.

As he says, that bounce back was actually very important in establishing trust that this Spanish brand was in the UK for the long haul.

Dodds stepped back from the managing director role in 2022, becoming executive chairman, and his former financial and services director Rashpal Sidhu took over the day-to-day running of the company.

But now it’s time to step away completely and while so many of those very heartfelt messages that came after the announcement wished him a happy and well-deserved retirement, that isn’t quite how he sees it. 

“I may well be tempted to take on something else if the right opportunity arises,” he says. “It isn’t necessarily retirement…”

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You’re moving on at a time when the market is in flux, what’s your current assessment of where we are? 

The problem is we’ve been waiting and assuming an upturn for two years. Everybody’s been saying ‘next quarter’ and then ‘second half of the year’ but it hasn’t come. Whether it’s the war in Ukraine, whether it’s Trump, whether it’s lots of other global issues, something has stopped confidence from returning. So, while the outlook should still be better for 2025, I’m not as confident as I was a few months ago that it will be significantly so. 

Do you think this market can be guilty of sitting back and waiting for it all to blow over?

I’ve always been conscious of trying to avoid that. Over the years we’ve grown and taken market share and people ask who we’re taking that share from and I always say ‘I really don’t know’. I don’t spend any time on it because it’s not that important. Even when the market’s tough, it’s still a big market and there’s business out there. So I’ve always tried to be more focused and get across that our destiny is in our own hands.

Does the size of Roca slightly shield you from a lot of that?

It does to some extent but, obviously, if you’re bigger a 5% or 10% reduction in the market is a much larger number and therefore the implications are broadly the same. It gets harder to take share when you’re bigger, but it’s still possible. There’s so many different niches, sectors, brands and products in the market that there’s no shortage of places to look for business. I think if you sit back and believe everything is doom and gloom and all you do is tell tales of woe then that’s what will happen to you.

You have experienced many peaks and troughs of the market in your 25 years at Roca so how does this trough compare?

This is a much smaller one. It’s not the same as the downturn that followed the big financial crash in 2008, obviously Covid ground everything to a halt and there was the slowdown through the Brexit period. I’m not saying there’s a tried and tested way of getting through them, but when you’ve lived through downturns you start to know that there are things that you can do to make the situation better. The current market is not one of the worst but what’s different this time is we all assumed it was going to be very short and it hasn’t been.

There are new disruptors coming into the UK bathroom market, do you think they’re shifting the sector?

In the last four or five years the pace of the industry has totally changed because of new companies and brands but the market will always evolve. Previously, the internet was the massive disruptor but that landscape has now totally changed again. Lots of internet businesses were sold for millions of pounds on the basis of rapid growth continuing. Victoria Plum was the classic example of that, within a few years it was making a loss. I’m not saying that online disruption is gone, but a lot of internet businesses have disappeared because, funnily enough, when you’re the cheapest in the marketplace you struggle to make money.

When you first started at Roca, the UK was still dominated by UK brands like Ideal Standard, Twyford or Shires. Now it’s now a much more European market so is there a British influence?

It’s true that back when Roca UK started, we were one of the first outsiders and it’s definitely been a huge transition since but the UK is a really important market for big European brands so its influence is massive. When they talk about trends coming out of Europe that includes, rather than excludes, the UK. When we first started, we used to have to ask Roca for a lot of very specific UK products like two taphole basins and small cloakroom basins and they’d say ‘ok, we’ll do it for the UK, but there’s no market for it elsewhere’. But, funnily enough, when they launched those products, those other markets said, ‘yeah, we can sell them’ and many of those products are now standard. So, we’re definitely in the mainstream of European products, we influence styles because we’re a big market.

Sustainability is an industry-wide challenge and Roca has always been very committed to it, but that commitment hasn’t really been matched by retailers or consumers. Why do you think that is?

It’s all about communication. I think consumers are genuinely interested in sustainability and I can honestly say Roca does take it very seriously and that comes straight from the family and there’s massive investment behind that. But, as an industry, we’ve got to do a better job of convincing consumers what it actually means. That’s especially true when it comes to making the case that less water doesn’t mean a lower performance. Everybody has stayed in a hotel where the water is dribbling out of the shower and, you’re right, they do equate it with that experience.

I’ll ask about career highlights in a minute, but are there any lowlights? 

Well, in 2001 – one year into my tenure – we rather carelessly burned our warehouse down. Although, as it turned out, the way we bounced back probably convinced the customer base that we weren’t going to go away.

Did you find out how it started?

In those early days to protect the pallet of products, we used to put a plastic sheet over it and then use a heat gun to shrink it and fix it in place. We assumed that we had charred a pallet and it had smouldered and caught light. However, about seven or eight years ago, the police told me they’d caught someone who said they’d started it. They’d arrested him for another fire, and he confessed to 30 other arsons in the area, including ours.

And what are the highlights from the last 25 years?

The most satisfying thing is that we’ve been able to achieve growth year in, year out in a very consistent way. I’ve been very fortunate as Roca has always said ‘we don’t want to grow massively one year and then shrink the next. We’d like steady and consistent growth’. We’ve managed to achieve it and I’m very proud of that. We’ve also built a great team and kept many of our staff for a long time but that’s the case across the whole of Roca.

I think family-owned businesses always take a longer term view.

Yes, I agree, that approach sets the culture. There aren’t any knee jerk reactions. There’s no panic. They don’t expect you to grow 25% when the market is 20% down. I’m also very proud of establishing Laufen in the UK and we’re one of the few markets that is equally successful with both Roca and Laufen brands. But above all, I get huge satisfaction from the fact that we are pretty much in all market sectors. We’re in retail, we’re in merchants, we’re in house building, we’re in projects and that’s kept the job interesting and enjoyable because Roca is a company that deserves to be everywhere.