Wickes "Free" kitchen planer service - who pays ?

cddc

Of course you are crazy to buy a kitchen from a shed out of sale.

Of course designers get commision but they get a basic too.

Of course designers dont expect to sell every plan, between 4 and 5 in 10 as a rule.

Of course you are not going to get the same margin on a kitchen as on a pint of milk.

Until the public vote with their feet, of course the hi-lo pricing model will remain. Anyone ,Wickes included, who have tried to move away from it have lost sales as a result and end up going back to it.

Of course the designer will not give you the plan if you do not buy. Do you give work away for free?

Of course kitchen cabinets are made of chipboard. Even high end ones are.

LittleMax

Annie1960 wrote: »

Interesting, as my local Wickes refused to let me have a copy of the design! They wanted over £18k from me for a kitchen, Homebase want £12k for similar.

Didn't have a problem getting a copy of the design from Wickes - but not worth the paper it was printed on. I lost count of the number of tray spaces their 'designer' gave me! In the end I designed it myself. We did find Wickes units to be best value but waited for an extra 10% off the 50% off, so 55% off list price. This was 8 years ago, so things may have changed. We did the fitting ourselves.

Davesnave

cddc wrote: »

Of course the designer will not give you the plan if you do not buy. Do you give work away for free?

We found it easy enough to get designs from Howdens and two independents, but I'd say we put as much into them as they did during the evolutionary process.

We would also have had a design from one of the sheds, but after sitting through 2.5 hours of them struggling with new software, they somehow lost it....and so did we! :rotfl:

We took our 'evolved' design to a fourth independent, who didn't really like it at all and tried to change it. Apart from some minor tweaks, they did little with our plan, but refused point blank to give us a copy till we'd paid something up-front.

At that point I'd have been happy to go to an on-line supplier and get a respected local fitter involved, but the kitchen was only part of a larger project, so we went with this company, knowing they'd install well, which they did.

I know some people will just sit there and let the designer do everything, but some of us have the patience and tenacity to give plenty of input too. We like our 'wrong' kitchen.