Words: Darren Taylor

I was honoured to be a judge, yet again, for the kbbreview Retail & Design Awards 2025. Together with 800 other industry guests, I loved celebrating beneath the glitter ball in the iconic Blackpool Tower Ballroom in April.

I talked to lots of people about how business was going, and many felt the same as me. If the mantra of ballroom dancing is slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, this also represents the current state of the KBB market, mine included.

In late 2024, I had my first ever 11-week drought where no one bought a kitchen. It was slow, slow, and terrifying. Then, by March this year, I was awash with orders, where clients wanted kitchens and more, quick, quick. Then came Easter so it slowed down, but at time of writing, we are back dancing the foxtrot again.

Based in Winchester, my business is at the premium-to-luxury end of the market and my client-base is focused between Hampshire and London. At 33 years’, mine is the longest-established independent with a very strong local brand presence, and lots of word-of-mouth recommendations together with more than 100 five-star Google reviews.

I believe that Winchester has always been a bellwether for the state of the KBB market because is a relatively small, yet affluent city, which had a plethora of premium kitchen showrooms.

Until 2023, there were 14 kitchen studios, mainly within walking distance of each other. That figure has recently decreased to 10 due to branches closing, relocations, or retailers closing entirely. The precarious state of the UK economy is a major factor, another being that certain chain retailers expanded too fast, the other that the competition was too great. There are, after all, only so many premium customers to go around in one region.

I had previously flirted with an expansion to the Unites States, selling English kitchens to an American audience. I am glad I stayed local, as it must be very hard to add on to the cost of an already high-priced proposition, when an additional 10% is added as a tariff just ‘because’. However, we UK retailers have our own post-Brexit and post-pandemic issues.  We used to rely on consistent patterns of consumer behaviour, which rarely changed.

Previously, prospective clients would give you a brief. Once designs were presented, the client would make the order within six weeks, the deposit would be paid, and on to the next sale. Like a Viennese Waltz, we would just go around and round again. Not any more.

Potential clients visit us, sound really interested when we deliver the most dynamic and thoughtful design presentations, then they disappear into thin air for months on end, as if we are being ‘ghosted’.

Whatever happened to hot leads? After months of polite following-up and a lot of head-scratching, I have begun to imagine ever more interesting places where these clients may have gone: did they decide to emigrate, are they canoeing up the Amazon, or are they climbing the North face of the Eiger? They are not ordering a bloody kitchen, that’s for sure!

Then, as if by some miracle, they suddenly reappear. Like the fastest of quicksteps, they want everything, a kitchen, a utility room, a boot room and often more, and quick, quick.

Understanding that the decision-making process is now a much longer one, we can future-proof our businesses. In this new world of shifting consumer behaviours, we need our suppliers to understand this too. We need prices to remain the same for longer, because I hope this trend is not a slow waltz, but just a “cha cha cha, Darling.”

Oh, and I once sold a bespoke kitchen to Craig Revel Horwood…