Best in Show

Every time a potential client walks through your doors, your showroom is on a job interview. And, as with any potential employer, your prospect is going to have a lot of questions and spend a lot of time just looking and getting a feel for its potential employee, your firm.

Who wouldn’t want to have the best on display when it could mean making a pivotal and profitable kitchen or bath sale? Often, the only view of your firm that potential clients will ever get to see is the one that greets them when they walk in the door of the showroom. That’s why first impressions aren’t just important, they’re critical to your success.

Designs may vary, and tastes and technology may change and evolve, but one thing remains constant: The showroom is a firm’s best sales and marketing tool. Whether the firm is a design business, design-build or a straight materials supplier/fabricator, three things are key: the need to keep current on interactive technology to bring homeowners into their project while they’re in the showroom; space to show a variety of products in side-by-side comparisons, and unique elements that can sell a client on the firm’s style.

This month, KBDN highlights some innovative showrooms and looks at the design strategies they employ to keep clients coming back for more.

There’s No Place Like Home

Selection centers or design hubs have long been a showroom standard, allowing potential clients to make back-to-back product comparisons. Some designers have shunned this approach, citing its relative coldness and seeking to incorporate different products into fully designed rooms.

IMAGINE Your Home by Orren Pickell seeks to do just that, say Tom Hackett and Cathy Schager, IMAGINE’s managers.

The rooms in the Northfield, IL showroom “are designed to assist our clients in visualizing themselves already living in their new space,” says Hackett.

However, many dealers believe that at some point, you can’t get around having to display a lot of product in a showroom, even if it means sacrificing atmosphere for selection. Whether it’s a result of lack of space or other factors, back-to-back product displays just make sense for some firms. However, designers say there are better and worse ways to do this.

Cheryl Hamilton-Gray, CKD, who has designed 20 showrooms both nationally and internationally for kitchen, bath and surfaces-related industries, says the best approach differs depending upon what the firm chooses to focus on.

“Appliance showrooms are more apt to feature straight product displays, but a cabinetry showroom will show the product in the context of a vignette or fully designed room. A tile or stone showroom would show product in both contexts,” she says.

Wilkinson Supply, which operates three showrooms in Raleigh, Durham and Carrboro, NC, opened the doors of its newest showroom, Salon Blue Ridge, in Flat Rock, in January. According to Audrey Wilkinson, outside sales manager, the showroom takes a different approach to the standard selection center, combining a little of all of Hamilton-Gray’s ideas.

“In the tile showroom, for example, all of the tile is on a hanging display system we created because we wanted to display the tile in the same way designers display fashion,” she says. “All of our appliances are on rolling carts, so we have the ability to roll any appliance up to the electrical, gas or water hook-up and turn on the appliance.”

This versatility, Wilkinson says, is important because it allows clients to fully experience a product’s range and enables the client to make an informed, and often quicker, buying decision.

Jayne Wolf, of DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen of Rockford, MI, describes a “color” room in the firm’s showroom, where many samples of products are stored.

“There’s a spectacular quartersawn oak island with an unusual granite top. Clients can sit at the island to look over product catalogues or have all of their products placed on the island to see how they might go together,” she says. “One finds many door styles and glazes, countertop choices and samples of wood flooring in this room.”