Inside Spezial, no. 16 of March 23, 2018, interview with Rainer Kalesse
Oversized presentations, untapped opportunities from the supply industry and the problem with variety: Rainer Kalesse, for many years a product designer at Nolte Küchen and self-employed with his own design office since March 2017, tells it like it is: Much could go better for the industry if the courage to take risks were greater. But he too needs courage to take risks every now and then. For 2017 he can look back on a good result with his newly founded design office and expects 2018 to go just as well. Kalesse is currently working on several projects, for example a new luminaire, and also on concepts for online furniture retail. And he has registered his name as a trademark.
INSIDE: Mr. Kalesse, the mood in furniture retail is more mixed than euphoric. In your view, what would it take to revive the furniture business?
Rainer Kalesse: What furniture retail really lacks is closeness to reality: picking up the customer, in principle, where they need solutions. And really presenting the home as living space. To put it in a very rough formula: people have to be made to want furniture again.
Are there examples where it works?There is only one good example, and that is Ikea.
What are the others doing wrong?Often, furniture is reduced to its outer shell. The ideas and innovations behind it mostly don't reach the end customer at all. Look at the manufacturers: they provide a lot of input, but in the end it is hardly communicated to the end customer.
So you see the problem primarily in retail?I see it solely in retail. Just take Ikea, the sample apartment you can find there. In 67 square meters, very true to life, Ikea can depict a space for a family, with a children's room and everything that goes with it, including the accessories. If you look at a classic German furniture retailer, for example in the sleeping area, the beds are simply standing in a row. That is not appealing.
Does it work better in other segments?Not necessarily. In the presentation of kitchens you often see that the kitchen spaces, even in the latest presentations, such as at trade fairs, are getting ever more gigantic. Real kitchens are on average still between eight and twelve square meters. Yet a planner is challenged quite differently when planning a small space.
You find similar impressions in many home magazines.
I find that partly even frustrating for the end customer. And if you look at a kitchen showroom in retail, there are showrooms with up to 300 sample kitchens. That is unnecessary. The customer hardly ever finds again a kitchen they once discovered for themselves. If you look at Ikea stores, a maximum of 20 kitchens are presented. That makes economic sense: Ikea has around 50 locations in Germany. That makes 1,000 sample kitchens. Look at how many sample kitchens the kitchen manufacturers have in retail; for some it may be 20,000. That cannot be economically sensible or effective.
Another question is how much of the suppliers' appetite for innovation reaches retail at all?It doesn't reach the end customer at all. The end customer sometimes has no chance to buy such things because they are not even listed. One can say quite clearly that the supply industry is far more innovative than the furniture industry.
One reason may be that the furniture industry now partly earns so little money that it no longer dares anything new. The really big problem in the furniture industry is that innovations are seen as a risk and not as an opportunity. Does that apply to large and small manufacturers alike? I even believe that smaller manufacturers are currently making better use of their opportunities, Ballerina or Rotpunkt for example. And the role of the big ones like Nobilia is limited to expanding capacity and applying pressure? By nature, the big ones always have a certain power, which is also strengthened by the furniture buying groups. As for Nobilia, I have to be honest, the decision on the second site is somehow hard for me to understand. Because in my view, Nobilia's strength so far was its concentration on exactly one site, one collection and a small, homogeneous management team. That seems to be changing at the moment, at least from my perspective.
Let's return to the suppliers. Where do you currently see exciting topics?I find 360-degree fittings quite exciting. That is also one of those topics that I claim end customers will love. In the end the question is whether a manufacturer commits to it and then really stages the topic well in the market. Then, of course, lacquer laminate (»Lacklaminat«) has been a great topic.
Has been?Well, its importance is still rising. But there are some manufacturers who are currently deliberately trying to turn away from it. I still maintain that the best thing about lacquer laminate is the name. It creates a sense of security, because lacquer is known as a high-quality surface and laminate as hard-wearing. So with the term lacquer laminate, the end customer leans back, relaxed and happy. The salesperson too. But there are, after all, those reservations.
Is the material really as durable as promised? There are doubters.
I would argue differently. From the end customer's point of view, lacquer laminate may even be more hard-wearing than lacquer. If you have small children at home, for example, and they drive past some lacquered piece of furniture with their Bobby Car and the lacquer chips off, you have a white primer underneath. That looks rather unsightly. With lacquer laminate there is no white primer. You wouldn't see it there.
Would exclusive fittings be a way for kitchen manufacturers to differentiate themselves better?Over the course of my career, I have changed my attitude toward exclusivity significantly. Exclusivity often has the disadvantage that market penetration is not there. I think it is much more important to have a certain lead time with new products. Exclusivity also has a very big disadvantage. As a manufacturer, I can hold my upstream supplier to account and demand exclusivity. But the supplier also has competitors, and they can then stage similar things in the market.
What opportunities does digitalization offer in solving the problem?The kitchen as it is presented at the moment is, I think, hardly suited to online marketing. You simply need different furniture concepts. For me as a designer, that is also a totally interesting and exciting task. If you approach it in a slightly more modular way, it can certainly work. But that would really be a completely new concept.
What might that look like?I already have a quite concrete concept in mind. But I am still looking for the right client for it.
New furniture concepts are currently rather scarce. Where is something moving at the moment, looked at through the trend lens?
Simple is generally always better. But the functionality of furniture is still an important topic. Multifunctionality, of course, does not mean that the furniture now comes across like a piece of technology. Everything should be easy to handle, and changing the furniture should be fun too.
“The best thing about lacquer laminate is the name.”
So is variety demanded in this respect?The customer wants choices. But the furniture industry often overwhelms them with too much variety. That actually creates the opposite: confusion. And confusion, in the worst case, even creates reluctance to buy. In the kitchen industry too, the topic of variety is absolutely exaggerated. If I were being really nasty, I would even say you could almost speak of a mutual arms race.
In which areas do you see variety as exaggerated?When it comes to décors or front finishes, for example. If you simply count among the manufacturers, you find that there is hardly a kitchen manufacturer with fewer than 20 white fronts. In some cases it goes up to 30 white fronts. You don't need this variety at all. But everyone still wants to be part of every material system and every shade. A counter-example: the smallest collection and the biggest volume on the market belongs to Nobilia.
So the principle “less is more” remains the old, big trend topic?And the fact that everything is becoming ever more global, also through the media. And I believe national borders are dissolving ever further among manufacturers. Everything becomes more fluid and ever more interconnected. In addition, living space is getting smaller, so in the end furniture has to be able to do more; and here too we have arrived again at the topic of multifunctionality.
And you really see nobody implementing the topic appropriately?Especially in the high-end sector there is a German manufacturer that deliberately deals with smaller spaces too. Because it has also found that its clientele, and that really is in the upscale price range, partly lives in urban areas where the kitchen may only be ten or twelve square meters. There someone has understood how it works and what it is about.