Ian Mc Fadden

What does CKB stand for and what is your role?

Ian: CKB is Curtis Kitchens and Bathrooms. I joined CKB Design as Sales Director in June 2023. I wanted to test myself, to see whether we could improve the showroom's position, bring the sales figures up, and drive the business to new heights.

We'd inherited the old showroom model, which had been losing steam over the previous decade. We've been open for over 30 years, so it was time we reworked a few key aspects of the business to drive it forward.

The overall aim was to figure out what systems and structures we needed to put in place, where we were falling down, and what was still working. Both myself and the owner are involved in sales and design, so we take on a good deal of the day-to-day running of the business, alongside the rest of the sales team and designers.

You have spent more than a decade in the KBB industry — what makes it worth staying in for you?

Ian: It's a fantastic, close-knit community across Ireland and the UK, with some brilliant people in it. Everyone knows everyone in some capacity, which lets you build lasting relationships right across the sector.

I've just come off a trip to Turkey with My Life Bathrooms. There were about 56 of us in all, customers and staff, brought out for a holiday and a bit of a getaway by Andrew and his team. The warmest, nicest bunch of people you could ever meet, who genuinely care about what they're doing and about building a community with their partners and colleagues. It's relationships like that which make the KBB industry so rewarding.

It's also an industry I feel is severely under-resourced when it comes to new talent. If you speak to almost anyone in it, more often than not they're someone who stumbled into it by accident. Nobody comes out of school or college saying, "I'm going to sell bathrooms and tiles." It's not seen as an aspirational title.

But what I've found over the last couple of years, and it's a recurring theme among retailers, is that finding new blood, people with any drive to change the industry, is becoming very difficult. That's driving up demand for anyone who already has the experience and knowledge, and that's part of what makes staying in the KBB sector so rewarding. Demand for good people is very high. So while it might not look glamorous from the outside, for those willing to push to become the best in the field, there are some fantastic remuneration packages and opportunities available for people with the right attitude, even if that isn't obvious next to more glamorous-looking roles elsewhere.

Why are younger people not coming into the industry?

Ian: Arguably, as a sector, we do a very poor job of selling ourselves to the people we'd want coming in.

From the outside, with no knowledge of the KBB world, you'd assume the remuneration is low. If you're going into sales, you might look at the motor industry instead and think car commissions are higher, and we lose good talent that way to industries with lower barriers to entry. And our barriers are high. Most job posts ask for years of experience selling kitchens or bathrooms, because most showrooms are already stretched to capacity and need a new hire to hit the ground running. They can't afford to give up 6 to 12 months bringing someone up to speed. That mentality leaves us with an ever-shrinking pool of viable candidates, and I think the answer lies in taking a leaf out of Jim Collins' Good to Great. Hire for attitude, train for the rest.

The other side of it comes down to the lower end of the market. For a lot of people coming from a poorer economic background, their idea of a showroom is one of the big nationals, generally a rough enough set-up, trade counters and the like, and they think, "That's not a career I want." They're not picturing the likes of West One Bathrooms or CP Hart, because they've no experience of what the higher-end, luxury side of the industry can be. It's like going from Shein to Milan Fashion Week, two ends of the same spectrum, and what 90% of people are exposed to day to day is the lower end.

Most people buy a bathroom two or three times in their life. They might build a house once, if they're lucky, and when they do, they're usually not bringing their children along to see the process. So nobody grows up with any sense of what this industry can be, and people leaving school or college don't see it as aspirational.

What they also don't see is the job security on offer. I feel genuinely privileged to have the experience I do. Even before retail I spent about three years in tiling, so I've seen it from every angle. It's not an industry you can get a niche college degree for. You have to put the work in, take an interest, take self-education seriously, learn the business models and the design side. But if you do that, you'll have job security for life, precisely because so few people are coming in. If something terrible happened and our doors closed tomorrow, I'm confident I could walk into a decent position straight away. There's a lot of security in that, and we should be shouting about it.

What should solo operators like designers and independent service-providers be aware of before they enter KBB?

Ian: There are two big things. The first is the constraint on capacity. I'm a firm believer in this. I've no proper name for it, but it's something I keep coming back to with our team.

Everyone has a fixed amount of capacity in a week. Say a person has ten units of capacity per week. That means they can serve ten customers at peak efficiency and, in an ideal world, service them well enough to convert most of them, if not all. But the moment that same person is handed thirteen customers, those extra three don't simply sit in a queue. They eat into the capacity that's already there. So instead of properly serving ten, they end up properly serving maybe seven, because the overflow drags down everything else.

That's an overly simplified way of putting it, but for a solo designer, designing, selling, organising, doing site visits, fielding every phone call, capacity becomes the binding constraint. And when capacity is overrun, service is the first thing to slip.

The second thing is how you frame your offer as you move up-market. As you climb the spectrum of quality and expectation, you move away from being a commodity reseller, everyone has more or less the same brushed-finish shower or tap or vanity unit, to a position where your real value is the design, the service, the white-glove handling, taking the burden off the customer. I really believe that in today's market, with the middle and lower end being squeezed so hard, the moment you move to a higher-end offering you stop being a bathroom retailer and become a service company.

And this is where the two points meet. If you're overstretched and your capacity is overrun, your service level drops and the customer's expectations aren't met. They came expecting a ten-out-of-ten, and when you deliver a seven, still fine, still better than most nationals, it falls short of what they were promised. That leaves a bad taste, and that's what kills your reputation, your word of mouth, your referrals, all the goodwill you've built.

So what should solo operators be doing?

Ian: It's a balancing act. I firmly believe you need enough bodies to handle the capacity coming through the door, or else you move to a model where you're willing to say no.

I've done a lot of research into capacity, looking hard at how we've been working as a company, and the conclusion I've reached is to move to an appointment-only basis. You have to start turning away the projects that aren't going to benefit you. It's not about being rude, and it's not about pricing yourself out. It's about protecting enough capacity that you don't damage your own reputation and brand. Brand-building is an enormous part of this, and you can't undermine it by saying yes to everyone simply to keep people happy. In the long run that only ends one way, with unhappy customers you couldn't service to the level they expected, because your capacity was already spent.

Your brand is essentially a promise to the customer about what to expect when they deal with you. It's all about their perceived likelihood of getting the result they want. When someone sees CKB Design, they understand the brand. They know that paying an extra couple of thousand per bathroom to go with us means they're not going to be chasing tradespeople or dealing with problems. They're going to get the result they want, a fantastic bathroom, and no concerns. We've transitioned away from selling products to selling certainty.

Look at the other operators out there, often just as capable as us, but completely over-capacity and overstretched, running from customer A to customer B to customer C, making mistakes along the way. That shows up in negative word of mouth and poor reviews online. The next customer researching them sees it and thinks, "They might be a couple of thousand cheaper, but I'll go through a lot of stress to get there, and I might not even get the result I want."

We've lost so much of the lower and mid-market to the big nationals that we're deliberately moving to the higher end and concentrating hard on brand and reputation. And for any other operator doing similar, I'd say it's vital to get that right. It simply can't be ignored.

How can standard high street businesses pivot into the luxury space? 

Ian: This is exactly what we set about doing three years ago, around June 2023. For the first six months we sat back and observed the company, what we were doing well and what we were getting wrong. Then we put the changes in place at the start of 2024.

The first was a supplier cull. We looked at the mid-level showrooms around us, each dealing with 20, 30, 40 suppliers, buying a little from everyone, giving each such a small share of spend that no supplier had any real loyalty to them, and none was given any in return. So we cut our list from around 35 suppliers down to eight or ten, and the results were immediate. Service levels improved overnight. We went from being a very small account to each of them to being one of their main accounts in the country. Within two or three months we'd negotiated better terms across the board. That improved our service, but it also put five to six percent onto our net margin, which was enormous. It let us serve customers better and buy better at the same time, and everything in this business comes down to relationships, whether with customers or suppliers. We were strengthening both at once.

The second change, and the most important, was a complete shift in mindset. We'd been sitting in that low-to-mid-market space where a customer walks in and the sales team runs for the cheapest shower to make an easy sale. There was nothing more to it than that. We moved from being a bathroom retailer to a service provider, building the relationship, designing the bathroom out, doing the drawings and the VR walkthrough, handing over proper technical packs. Customers buy a bathroom two or three times in their life, usually decades apart. They don't understand the process, and they arrive not knowing what they're meant to do. Taking them by the hand and guiding them through it, becoming a service proposition rather than a retailer, is what lets us command a premium. Where a retailer up the road sells a similar product, we'll achieve a 20% premium on it, because we've invested the time in the client.

Other retailers charge a design fee for their consultation process and their Virtual Worlds designs. We've taken the opposite view. If we invest the time and effort in the customer without charging upfront, that reciprocity generally comes back to us. We win a lot of business off the ones who charge, because in those showrooms the customer walks in, gets no warmth and no hospitality, and is asked for hundreds of euro just to explore what they're trying to do. These are often beautiful, well-thought-out showrooms with good reputations, but the customer walks out, travels over to us, and has a very different experience, one where we show genuine interest and care. It's one of our highest-converting sources of new customers: people walking in from those other showrooms, because with us they get the complete opposite experience. We treat them as people, we look at their problem, we give them our time. We're not the cheapest, but it isn't the product they're buying from us. It's the service. The fact that we'll deal with the builders on site, have the difficult conversations, and go out of our way when it's needed.

The third thing is elevating the showroom to line up with where we believe our service proposition sits. It doesn't have to be extravagant. I did an exercise recently, visiting around 50 bathroom retailers across the country, and I was struck by how many simply don't care about the state of their showroom. Even where the display design or the product isn't the highest end, just having everything clean, tidied away and presentable makes an enormous difference. It's a simple lever for disproportionate gains that a lot of businesses are neglecting.

Tell me more about how you approached the showroom upgrade?

Ian: We started stripping out the showroom at the beginning of 2024, as a long-term project, and we did it gradually. In an ideal world I'd have loved to do it all in one go and have it done and dusted, but the scope simply wasn't there at the time. Turnover had been stagnant for a number of years leading up to 2023, never really dropping, but never moving significantly up either. Because of that, the capital to tear everything down and start again wasn't sitting there waiting.

We've renovated roughly 90% of it now, taking it from a mid-market showroom to something far more high-end and design-led, and bringing in higher-end brands that speak to the client who cares about quality and design rather than shopping purely on price.

And the more we do, the more it pays. From mid-2023 to the end of 2025 our turnover tripled, and our margin rose by five to six percent on top of that. Turnover up, margin up, and this year we're tracking around 60% ahead year to date. We're projecting to finish this year between four and five times the annual turnover we were doing just three years ago. It's really been paying dividends.

How do you explain this massive success?

Ian: I think people expect a single dramatic answer, one big move that turned everything around. But there wasn't one. It was hundreds of small ones.

There's an obvious part, of course: if you've no higher-end product in the showroom for the customers who want it, they'll go elsewhere and you miss that demographic entirely. That one matters. But if I had to explain the real change, it's that we went looking for one percent everywhere. The supplier terms, the way we greet someone at the door, the speed we turn a drawing around, how a display is lit, the follow-up call, the tidiness of the showroom. None of those is a game-changer on its own. You'd barely notice any single one.

But get one percent better across every part of the business and it compounds. Those tiny gains stack on top of each other until the whole operation is operating at a completely different level, and the customer feels that difference long before they could ever point to what caused it. That's the part competitors can't easily copy, because there's no one thing to copy. It's a hundred things done a little better.

The flip side is discipline. Those one-percents only compound if you actually keep taking them off, bite-sized chunk after bite-sized chunk. Sit still and do nothing, and you stay exactly where you are while everyone else inches past you.

You've worked both with suppliers and retailers. What's one thing that can improve their working relationships, and why isn't it happening right now?

Ian: The biggest thing is for both sides to accept that there has to be a bit of meat on the bone for everyone.

I saw this constantly during my time with Crosswater. Some retailers try to take all the good out of the deal, and equally, some wholesalers do exactly the same in the other direction. When a retailer pushes a wholesaler to the point where there's no margin and nothing left in it for them, the relationship sours. They won't openly avoid your calls, but you stop getting the level of service you know they're capable of. And everyone talks in this industry. Treat someone poorly and the whole country hears about it soon enough.

So it has to be fair to all parties. It can't be about squeezing every last drop out of a deal. There has to be something in it for both sides.

The other half of it is simply service. People buy from people. My Life Bathrooms get this absolutely right. In my view they are best-in-class for service. The product is good, the price is reasonable, and their people are phenomenal. Because of that, I'd never consider doing a project without them as a supplier. The reps, the office team, the technical people, once you have that kind of personal backup behind you, it means everything. You'll do enormous volume with a company that supports you properly.

And it works the other way too. I've dealt with suppliers who had real service issues over the last couple of years, and to their credit, they're getting on top of it now. But there was a spell where, even with strong terms and good margin on the table, the hassle simply wasn't worth it. That's how much service matters. It can outweigh margin entirely. It's the one area I'd urge any supplier to protect above all else.

We keep hearing that sales reps are feeling sad these days. What's causing it?

Ian: What I can see is that a lot of wholesalers and businesses, many of them family-run, are moving from being close-knit operations into very corporate structures.

Speaking to a few people who've recently left rep positions, it comes down to feeling micromanaged within an inch of their lives. Every phone call, every time they get in the car, all of it has to be tracked, reported and sent back up the line. So instead of building relationships, getting sales and knocking on doors, the job they were actually hired to do, they're spending half their time or more on paperwork and reporting. I remember it from my own days as a rep. There were stretches where I'd be lucky to get out on the road one or two days a week, and the rest was swallowed by admin that was never the job I signed up for.

Couple that with market conditions and the pressure compounds. When the market's up, things ease a little. When it's down, you're still expected to hit the same growth targets regardless. A rep is typically asked to deliver 10 to 20% growth on the previous year's figures, every single year. After ten consecutive years of that, it's compounding on itself to the point of being unrealistic. And most of these reps are on a fairly modest base, with the real money meant to come from bonus and commission, targets that drift further from reality each year. That's a big part of it. What they're being asked to do gets a little less attainable every year.

There's no clean, easy answer to it. The board wants its pound of flesh, they want growth by year end, so how do you keep everyone happy? That's the tension.

Let's look at the end customer. What changes are you seeing in customer behaviour right now?

Ian: We're seeing a clear drive toward quality and a move away from mass-produced, lower-end product, and a lot of that is being driven by social media.

With new builds and renovations, there are now huge Facebook and community groups online, some with tens of thousands of members, all asking for advice: thoughts on brassware brands, what to avoid, what's worth the money. There's plenty of misinformation floating around in them too. But the effect is that people arrive at the showroom having already pre-vetted brands and products. They're better educated than customers were years ago, more focused on quality, and not afraid to spend a bit more to get it. Nobody walks in to our showroom now asking for the cheapest tile or the cheapest tap available anymore. Quality and brand are front of mind.

Through the combination of changes we've made, we've watched the average basket spend per bathroom go from around €3,000-€4,000 three years ago to roughly €11,000-€13,000 today. That isn't just inflation and rising prices. A great deal of it is people actively wanting higher-end product that will last them a lifetime.

The other side of it is that almost nobody wants a plain, four-square walls, standard bathroom anymore, so the design element has become far bigger for us. It's a genuine selling point now. We end up doing a lot of design work for most of our clients, and they're coming in with Pinterest boards and, increasingly, AI-generated images, which are both a good and a bad thing. I won't pretend I'm sorry to see the change, though. I always hated staring at four square walls, tiling them floor to ceiling and fitting the same suite back in.

What role is AI playing in all of this?

Ian: AI, in ways, is driving customer expectations to unrealistic places. Someone takes a photo of their bathroom, has AI render it into some renovated form, and the result doesn't even necessarily look spectacular. But the model has quietly designed the room with in-frame bespoke vanities and a frameless 10mm floor-to-ceiling shower enclosure along with some other high value products that the customer is not aware of. The customer arrives expecting a €10,000 price tag, and you're looking at the same image thinking it's closer to €50,000. So they're setting themselves up for a bit of a shock. It's less of an issue with Pinterest, where people are still often pulling from inspiration from real rooms, however, even this is getting more and more saturated with unrealistic AI renders that the general bathroom "Layperson," will have difficulty separating from reality.

Time will tell how the AI side develops. I think it's still very early, and we're only going to see more of it. The important thing is that retailers get on board and work out how to use it to their advantage, rather than ignoring it and hoping it fails, because it's here to stay.

What is the proper way that independents should be utilising AI?

Ian:  On my travels around the country, I've seen quite a few showrooms using ChatGPT to re-render customers' bathrooms and hand them a few ideas. But that's most of what they're doing. Getting the customer to send a photo, throwing it into ChatGPT more or less slapdash, hoping something usable comes back, and calling themselves a designer on the strength of it. There's no real control over what the model returns, no considered input, and no expertise being applied on top of it.

To my mind that misunderstands what the tool is for. Dropping a picture into an AI model with a prompt is a world away from sitting down with a customer and asking how they actually live. What do they need from the room, have they got young kids, do they need a lot of storage, is it a busy family bathroom or a quiet en suite, what makes it work for them day to day? Then designing it out with them properly, with the AI supporting that process rather than replacing it. 

For a showroom trying to move up-market, leaning on AI the lazy way shows a real lack of design ability, and customers can feel that. They could have generated the same image themselves at the kitchen table, so you've given them no reason to come to you.

And that's the real danger in it. If a rendered picture is the whole of your offer, you've nothing left to compete on but price, which is the last place anyone moving up-market wants to be. Used well, AI should deepen the expertise you bring to the customer. Used lazily, it quietly strips your expertise away and leaves you racing everyone else to the bottom of the barrel.

What are some of your favourite software tools that make your life easy, and why would you recommend them?

Ian: Staying on the theme of AI, there's an app I came across after listening to one of Steven Bartlett's podcasts, called Wispr Flow, and it's the single best tool I've brought into the showroom. It's a dictation model. With a small lavalier mic, or even the one built into your laptop, you speak and it transcribes, but the clever part is the AI layer sitting on top. It strips out the ums and ahs and the false starts and writes everything back grammatically clean.

Where it's transformed things for me is customer notes. I'll be honest, I was historically terrible at them. I'd scribble a couple of lines at the start of a consultation and lose the thread after that. 

Now, the moment a consultation finishes, I go straight into the office and dictate everything while it's fresh, and it comes back typed up cleanly and clearly. Instead of my notes living across twenty different pads scattered around the showroom, half of them mislaid, I've a proper record I can actually refer back to. It does the same for emails and any bit of copy I need, and it gives me back a genuinely substantial amount of time across the week.

The other one I've championed for years is ArtiCAD over Virtual Worlds. There's no shortage of Virtual Worlds evangelists who'll tell you it's the only serious design software, but I'd argue ArtiCAD has it beaten on the two things that matter most in a live showroom. It's a fraction of the cost to run, and the speed you can produce a high-quality drawing at is on another level. I can turn a full VR walkthrough around for a customer, headset on, walking through their own bathroom, in about twenty to thirty minutes. The same job in Virtual Worlds used to take me well over an hour.

And speed is the whole game with conversions. If we get back to a customer the same day or the next with drawings and a quote, we'll usually convert them. Let it stretch to a week or two and the rate drops off a cliff. I won't say we lose everyone where our response time is slightly longer, but it's nowhere near the same as those that we can get a rapid turnaround done for. Fast and slightly less polished beats slow and perfect, almost every time when it comes to customer contact.

What opportunities and threats do you foresee for independents over the next few years?

Ian: With the rise of online retailers, and the lower and mid markets being swallowed up by the nationals with their enormous buying power, I do think a lot of small independents who don't move with the times will see their doors close. That's the hard reality of it.

The ones who survive will have to shift toward the higher-mid and higher end of the market. It's the same mindset change we've been talking about throughout, moving from being a commodity reseller to being a service business. That means driving the perception of your brand and offering a range of services you might never have offered before: design, hand-holding the client through the process, specification, technical packs, until it becomes a genuine end-to-end package. The hardest thing the client should have to do in the whole process is pick up the phone and make that first enquiry. 

I think we'll see that shift more and more over the next few years, and it's exactly what I believe independents should be aiming for. Get it right and you're no longer competing with the nationals on their terms, on price and volume. You're competing on something they can't easily replicate, which is the service and the experience around the product.

What's next for CKB Design, and what should we expect in the next few months or years?

Ian: The immediate priority is finishing what we've started. Completing the last of the showroom renovation, a rebrand to align the company with the higher end of the market we're now serving, and a proper relaunch night in the showroom. We've been at this over 30 years, we've done the rebrand, we've renovated top to bottom, so we want to mark it with a night for all our suppliers and customers who've come with us on the journey.

Beyond that, the real work is deepening the service proposition, because that's where the whole business is heading. My ambition is for CKB Design to reach a point where any customer who knows what we do would feel it slightly ridiculous to go anywhere else. That isn't about being the cheapest or the biggest. It's about being the safe choice, the one where the customer knows, before they've even sat down, that the result is going to be right. When a brand can communicate that reliably, price stops being the conversation.

Practically, that means getting relentless about the things around the product rather than just the product itself. The quality of the welcome, the speed we turn drawings and quotes around, the clarity of communication and process, the way we handle a site visit or a snag. None of those is dramatic on its own, but a series of small improvements across every touchpoint compounds into an experience a competitor can't easily copy, because there's no single thing for them to copy. It's a hundred small things done a little better than anyone else bothers to.

The other piece is taking every last bit of ambiguity and stress out of the process for the customer. Like we said earlier, most people purchase new bathrooms two or three times in a lifetime and don't understand the process, so the more we can absorb that uncertainty on their behalf, guiding them from first enquiry right through to a clean, finished room, the more valuable we become and the further we separate ourselves from anyone competing purely on price.

As generic as it might sound, it really does come back to continued growth through relentless service improvement. That's the whole game, and it's the part we intend to keep winning.