Since it was founded in 1989, RKW the trading division of family-owned Sutton Venture Group has risen to become one of Europe’s leading manufacturers and distributors of small domestic appliances and houseware products. The heart of its operations is a 750,000-square-foot distribution centre in the British Midlands, where it stocks over 4,000 products ready for next-day delivery.
RKW’s operations have spread across the UK, to Hong Kong and Mainland China. But wherever you find RKW, you will find them designing, developing, and distributing top-brand products that offer exceptional quality and unbeatable value.
“What makes us stand out is the investment we have put into the business over the last 35 years, the incredibly talented team we have built and the road map of product innovation we have planned for our portfolio of Great British brands,” says Rob Sutton, CEO and Managing Director of RKW.
Sutton is an engineer by background who started out repairing small domestic appliances. However, his career heated up in the late 80s. 35 years ago, Sutton travelled out to China to help set up manufacturing for the first electric kettle in the country, with a company that employed 30 people.
“Wind the clock forward and that company now manufactures 15 million kettles a year with a turnover in excess of £5 billion,” Sutton tells us. “From 30 people it has now grown to employ 30,000 people. We have great long-standing relationships with key factories out in the Far East because of our ability to drive brands forward and partner with companies that share our ethos.”
Today RKW is spread across three main divisions with a brand lineup of over 60 brands. The first of these divisions addresses RKW’s own range of product brands, a portfolio of 15 brands that includes household names such as Tower, Swan, Goblin, Redring, Wade, Royal Victoria and Burco.
“We have some really great brands with a really great heritage,” Sutton points out.
Added to that selection are the brands RKW has licensed from elsewhere, including BLACK+DECKER from the USA, and a recent collaboration with flagship brand Tower and the UK’s largest food media brand, Good Food.
“Good Food is Britain’s No1 food media brand and we are proud that Tower has been chosen to produce a range of premium housewares including cookware, food prep and storage. Using Good Food’s wealth of cooking experience, the two teams have partnered to develop products that are tried and tested and specially designed to be used with the vast Good Food recipe library” Sutton shares with us. “They have helped us to produce products that are truly best in class ready for their goodfood.com audience of over 37 million users.”
The third channel of RKW’s business is its distribution arm, collaborating closely with world-leading brands such as Smeg, Russell Hobbs, Lavazza and Numatic.
As a business, RKW has 15 specialist divisions and the widest distribution network in the UK with over 3000 retail partners including Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Argos, B&M, Currys, Very and Amazon. That distribution reach is set to grow thanks to a new distribution partnership with Italian company, Artsana.
“Artsana is best known for their baby products and has been represented in the UK with their own office and showrooms for the last 25 years,” Sutton says. “Its Chicco product range very much fits with the products and brands in our stable. Like us, they focus on top-quality products offering exceptional value for money. With our brand deal with Hubble Baby Monitors, we have quickly established RKW as a key player in the Nursery sector and our customers can now buy the Chicco range of products, further strengthening our position.”
The Appliance of Skills
RKW is a company that continues to expand, and even now Sutton says the company has plans to increase its turnover over the next three to five years. The challenge is achieving this while seeking out new talent for every area of the business.
“We have a university graduate scheme, and are very fortunate to be based in Stoke-on-Trent, near very high-quality universities,” Sutton says. “We can leverage that through our graduate schemes for many areas of the business including IT, marketing, finance and logistics and train those graduates into the way we work and invest in our staff.”
As well as offering those graduates the vital first steps in their careers, RKW also provides them with a path forward.
“We have a policy of giving employees the opportunity to elevate their positions,” Sutton shares. “We promote within the company, and we have a lot of employees who have been here for over 30 years starting on the warehouse floor and becoming company directors. We are a family business, and we make sure those family traditions are kept close to our heart.”
That team would prove more important than ever during the Covid pandemic, which Sutton calls the biggest challenge RKW has faced during its 35 years in business.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we experienced very high demand for our products because people were stuck at home with disposable income to spend,” Sutton says. “Then we were bombarded by a storm of turbulence in our logistics operations mainly caused by the UK government’s disastrous procurement of PPE from China.”
While 50,000 containers of PPE, some of it not even compliant with appropriate standards, flooded British ports, the containers that held RKW’s products were stuck.
“Our seasonal products that should have arrived in June, such as barbecues and air conditioners, arrived in November and December,” Sutton recalls. “It created a real challenge, to say the least.”
RKW was able to navigate through that challenge by leveraging support from its suppliers and 12 months later the firm had returned to trading normally. It has put RKW back in a strong market position. Sutton is optimistic about the company’s next steps, and the opportunity to bring its household names to houses all around the world.
“We are very excited about the future,” he says. “We are ready to implement our business transformation program; a three-year investment of over £10 million into our IT infrastructure to support the growth of the business internationally. Our brands are predominantly UK-driven but have the scope to become world-leading global brands. We have 12 award-winning, Great British brands, steeped in heritage, some of them over 250 years old. They are perceived as high quality, reliable and internationally respected. We now want to leverage these values to sell them not just in the UK but globally. We are putting the infrastructure in place in Europe, the USA, and the Far East to really leverage that opportunity.”
