Platform about design and technology in the kitchen, home, and bathroom industry
Stay in your cubicle. We all know Health Minister Maggie De Block's statement. Only for essential travel should we leave the house. Neighborhood stores and supermarkets, no further. Belgian retail toppers already called for Belgian webshops to be preferred to international ones. A train of thought that Royal Crown is also following.
Frank Rombouts of Royal Crown: "Pretty soon after the lockdown, we are already seeing results of this. We all read the reports of the clear water in Venice that suddenly turned out to have fish in it. We all read the positive impact on air quality. Since we are still allowed to go outside, taking the measures into account, we also notice these positive effects ourselves. I am not advocating that we all work from home permanently, but there is certainly a healthy balance between travelling by car or plane and teleconferencing. It works, that much is now clear. The value of a local store, or a network of local stores, was somewhat undervalued until today but that will change "thanks" to Corona. Of course there must be webshops and of course they must continue to exist. It is up to us to seek and find a healthy balance."
A used item, ranging from an interior object to a (kitchen) appliance has barely any value today, even if it is only about two years old. "Today we are encouraged to purchase a new appliance rather than have the 'old' one repaired," Rombouts confirms. "This is done through promotions, 'don't miss deals' and other interesting actions. The result, however, is that very few, if any, devices, or products, get a second life. Are we all, manufacturers included, going to think more about sustainability and circularity than volume? Are we also going to rethink our way of living and working? Today seems like the ideal time to think about this thoroughly. And if we change our way of living and working, will the function of a room also change? Today we live smaller and smaller, and in this smaller area it may no longer be possible to plan all the "traditional" rooms. So with Royal Crown, we are now thinking about the function of the kitchen in the (near) future. Will there still be a kitchen in a home at all? Will we soon see one communal kitchen per apartment block instead of a kitchen in each apartment individually? What will a kitchen of the future look like? Interesting questions that we at Royal Crown are already philosophizing about today."
How do we make a house or apartment of 75 square feet of area feel like one of 150 square feet of area? That key question is at the heart of Royal Crown's brainstorming sessions to "do shopping differently. "Definitely add to that the motto 'the right device for the right person,'" Rombouts emphasizes. "What is certain is that interior builders, including kitchen builders, have to use all the available space and, of course, do it as efficiently as possible. Utilizing every little nook and cranny is already a matter of course today. Royal Crown wants to go further than that, which is why we are working on an innovative online shop concept. It will be both a webshop and a lifestyle advice platform where we link every customer to a personal shopper. Our mindset will also be different. After all, we will sell "full drawers. All items will be available from us separately, but the starting point will always be the full drawer. We will also use per-drawer pricing, which is the drawer layouts and material together. Based on an online profile created by the customer, we make a choice and present it. Since our professionals have years of experience and are thorough in this, we suspect this will go smoothly. We do, of course, motivate customers to come and see the stores themselves. This is how we link online to offline experience."
