In June 2019, large bathroom retailer Bathstore went into administration. The huge chain which was founded in 1990 and has headquarters in Welwyn Garden City has 135 stores in the UK and going into administration put 531 jobs at risk.
Although since then, DIY giant Homebase have since come to the rescue of the brand, it didn’t stop the story breaking that the fitters, who are largely outsourced in the areas in which the chain operates, were owed a staggering £1M in unpaid payments.
The size of this type of operation doesn’t mean you get the best all the time and you’re not always assured that you’ll get the same fitter either.
Is this a bad thing?
Well it’s entirely down to the way that you view it. The fitters that Bathstore and other companies outsource to will no doubt be good at their trade and, hopefully, skilled and experienced. There will be a series of hoops to go through and boxes to tick. But of course, you won’t be assured that all the fitters are trained to the way that Bathstore operate, as that’s a very challenging level to achieve to such a scale.
We sometimes outsource
We do outsource some of our fitting too. We use a mixture of full time fitters who 100% work for us and some local extremely reliable bathroom fitters who have worked with us for years.
The few subcontractors we use are regularly employed by us and we know them very well. We pay them, not you, and we control the work from start to finish. What you get this way is a managed overall service from us with the high quality, design, and then fitting that our customers have come to expect.
In recent years we have heard stories of less than satisfactory fitting being carried out by big chains who have over-committed and then used substandard fitters.
We work differently.
We make sure that our fitters are not only known to us but that they consistently work to our high specifications. They buy into our values and ethos and strive toachieve the high standard you want and deserve for your bathroom.
The buck will always stop with us…
In the unlikely event that there’s any faulty workmanship with your bathroom, we’ll sort it out for you as it’s covered by our six year warranty against faulty workmanship.
If we tile your room and some grout falls out, we’ll sort it.
We won’t contact the fitter. We won’t tell you it’s not our fault.
We certainly won’t say,“He’s on holiday now for three weeks so we’ll get him to call you when he is back”.
Because we’re accountable.
What you will hear us say is something like,“Ok, are you in on Thursday? Ok great, we will send Mark/Joe/Darren/James to fix it for you.
You buy from us; not the fitters. We’ll make it right.
As a small company we control the entire process
We’re very proud to be a family business. One of the big reasons for this is that we’re small enough to care about the entire journey you have with us. When you grow huge like Bathstore did, you have no choice to use contractors and probably sub-contractors to carry out the work. There’s more room for error or sloppiness.
Here in our Coventry bathroom showroom we run the entire show. The vans park up here and the fitters are often in the store. It’s what we feel is the power behind our consistently high standards and exceptional customer feedback.
We can control it because we’ve not grown to a size that’s unmanageable. Alan Heath started working for himself in 1974 and started the company in 1986. Gary Heath is now in charge after being here for 31 years. So we’ve been around a while, and we’ve been focusing on high standards throughout our journey.
That’s how we’ve always run our business.
We’re not saying we’re better than the big boys… we’re just saying we’re more in touch with you, the process, the fitters, the products, and the final bathroom – because we can be.
It’s just the way we prefer to do things.
If you prefer to work with a professional local company who design, fit, and use all the products they sell then give us a call now or call into our bathroom showroom.
We’d love to chat about your new dream bathroom.