Transforming a brand into a category leader

Client: Kitchen Warehouse | Perth, Western Australia

Kitchen Warehouse is Australia’s #1 kitchenware retailer.

In 1996 the business opened its first retail store in Perth, Australia and grew slowly to include five ‘big box’ retail outlets in 2015. At that time the brand had an online presence that was marketed and operated separately from the primary retail business.

In 2015 I was asked by the Kitchen Warehouse CEO to fly to Australia and help them reimagine the future of their business.

Challenge

Kitchen Warehouse was a family business that was very much focused on doing business in Western Australia through a retail format, which up until that point had served the business well.

Retail in Australia is incredibly challenging; the marketplace is highly-competitive with many of the retailers cutting prices as a strategy to lure customers. Margins are thin and brand differentiation is not a priority.

The business at the time was struggling to grow and needed a credible plan as to how they were going to unlock sustainable value in the future.

Solution

We worked closely with the Kitchen Warehouse executive team and facilitated a series of workshops to capture their unique competitive advantage. We conducted a primary research program in the Australian market to better understand where the opportunities were and put together a strong competitive strategy for a repositioned brand.

We embarked on a radical rebranding exercise, complete with a brand new store design concept and merchandising style guide and the team set about updating the existing stores and applying the new ‘recipe’ to an aggressive national store rollout campaign.