Winning Her Business by Bridget Brennan

Author:Bridget Brennan [Brennan, Bridget]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

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BEST PRACTICE

Kohler Co.

Inspiration in Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink

If you’re renovating a bathroom and shopping for a new sink, what’s more inspiring to see at stores: rows of sinks bolted onto walls, or sinks that are situated in beautiful bathroom displays?

The displays, of course, but they’re not always easy to find in retail environments, since they take up valuable square footage. This poses a challenge for plumbing brands, because there’s not always room to showcase how products such as showerheads, toilets, faucets, and cast-iron tubs can create a look in someone’s home. To overcome this, global manufacturing giant Kohler Co. broke out of plumbing-industry norms and created its own line of direct-to-consumer stores, to inspire customers to build their dream homes with Kohler products. The company’s rollout of two retail concepts, Kohler Signature Stores and Kohler Experience Centers, offer great lessons for any business looking to bring its brand to life within four walls.

Dream. Design. Shop.

Walking into a Kohler Signature Store is like stepping into every fantasy you’ve ever had about rehabbing your home. The space is filled with beautiful bathroom and kitchen vignettes in every conceivable style and color palette, complete with elements such as wood cabinetry, tiles, modern lighting, and accessories so detailed that even the soap dishes look like works of art.

“We reverse engineered the stores based on what the customer wanted, and our customer base is 80 percent female,” says Michelle Kilmer, Kohler director of stores and showroom marketing. “Our message is focused on three things: dream, design, shop,” she explains. “We also offer professional design services and connect our customers with installation experts, because we wanted to put control in the hands of the customer.”

At the Kohler Experience Centers, which are expanded, premium versions of the Signature Stores, displays are so sophisticated that customers can see and feel running water from products like rain showers, handheld spray wands, and faucets. They can even bring a bathing suit to take a private test shower in one of the stores’ spa-like “experience rooms.” Yes, you can now test-drive a shower, which gives new meaning to the idea of an immersive brand experience.

You probably didn’t grow up visiting “plumbing stores” because the industry historically is a wholesale business. Kohler started to change that in 2005, a year when the US economy was going gangbusters, HGTV was becoming wildly popular, and interior design was moving beyond the Architectural Digest crowd and into the mass market. Suddenly, people felt empowered to create their own dream bathrooms and kitchens.

Enter Kohler, which became the first plumbing manufacturer to launch a direct-to-consumer retail strategy in the form of Kohler Signature Stores. Prior to the launch of these stores, customers had fewer places to see the kinds of luxury bathroom and kitchen designs featured in Kohler’s stylized advertising campaigns. Websites such as Houzz and Pinterest hadn’t been invented yet. Unless someone visited a plumbing showroom or hired a professional interior designer, it wasn’t always easy to see Kohler products in situ, and

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