Poised to take on top job after start on factory floor

May 23 2007 by Sophie Freeman, Liverpool Daily Post

Sophie Freeman meets TONY REED, contract sales director of Capricorn Kitchens

FOLLOWING your father into the family business may seem like the easy option – but Capricorn Kitchens’ Tony Reed is keen to dismiss this theory.

Reed’s career in kitchens began at the tender age of 13 when he started helping his father, Eddie, put the edging on cupboard carcasses in his small factory in Liverpool.

Working part-time around school and college work, Reed soon got to know kitchens “inside and out”.

But it is only 18 years later that Reed, 31, is about to take the top job: poised to take the reins of Capricorn Kitchens, when Eddie retires next year.

“It started in my parents’ garden shed 30 years ago,” said Reed. “My dad, who was working for Hygena Kitchens at the time, started taking “foreigners” (private jobs outside of work hours) and got more and more work. Then he took a factory down by Liverpool docks and we’ve been at the “new” place on Birchall Street for 25 years.

“You have to prove yourself so much more when it is a family business than you would if you worked for someone else. This is why I had to start at the bottom in the factory and then work my way into the office, initially doing admin and then moving into retail sales.”

The company, which trades under the NoName brand and has a £6m turnover, supplies around 1,000 kitchens a year for retail clients and developers in the North West such as David McLean, Iliad and Maghull.

PROJECTS with McLean include the apartment schemes Hudson Gardens, Statten Court and Manhattan Place in the Ropewalks/East Village area of Liverpool and, with Iliad, Capricorn has installed the kitchens on the Scholes Hall housing estate and will start on site at the Elysian Fields development in September. With Maghull, Capricorn has installed the kitchens in the former Post Office in Southport, along with The Guildhall in Macclesfield and the Met Apartments in Manchester.

“We make 20 kitchens a week – in the early days it was two or three at the most – but we want to be making even more,” said Reed, who grew up in Knowsley Village and works 12 hours a day, six days a week.

“We want to make kitchens for customers all over the country, not just in the North West and we’ve recently employed a new business manager to help us with that. He’s used to work for a company in Greater Manchester, and he’s great for getting business from outside Liverpool.”

Reed says his main retail competitor is Panorama Kitchens, a luxury kitchen company based in Tuebrook, and on the contract side it’s Yorkshire firms Moores Furniture Group and Symphony Kitchens.

There is very little profit margin with contract work, according to Reed, but it is the contracts division which has kept the company going.

“The builders know what (kitchens) they want now. Ten years ago they weren’t bothered but now they know that kitchens and bathrooms sell properties so they want to up the specification – but not how much they spend on them. We charge around £4,000 to supply and fit each kitchen.

“The recession was touch and go, it was a very hard time. Kitchens is not an easy business to be in, there’s lots of competition, but it is doing well with the contract side, so in that respect we are very fortunate.”

The order book for the next two years is full, with contracts for 1,500 kitchens and the company has expanded its Liverpool headquarters to more than 36,000 square feet in preparation.

“When we go for meetings with developers we don’t just want that scheme, we want a longer term contract,” said Reed.

“We’ve added 15,000 sq ft to the factory and added an internal lift. We’ve basically doubled the factory space because now we can work upstairs – all the manufacturing is done downstairs and shipped upstairs to be actually put together. We now employ 30 staff but we’re looking to employ more.”

THE most expensive kitchen Capricorn has ever fitted cost £85,000. It has a few celebrity endorsements, they’ve recently supplied a kitchen for Wigan footballer Matt Jackson, but a famous following is not important to Reed. “Most of the time they want it for free,” he laughs.

And if it wasn’t kitchens, Reed, who is engaged to a valuer from Halifax estate agents, said the only other thing he could think of doing is property developing.

But that is left to his sister, who handles the rental side of the business, H & R Properties. “We’ve had that about 10 years, it’s got something between 50 and 100 properties, but I don’t deal with that side at all,” said Reed.

His father will step down next year, but Reed is certain he will never be left to run the firm entirely on his own.

“I’m sure my father will always be involved in some formor another,” he smiles.