MD of Caple Danny Lay urges retailers to ask consumers about their cooking needs, and demonstrate how connectivity helps manage their time

Wi-fi-enabled appliances are in the mainstream now, but a lot of consumers don’t know why they might want or need them, and they don’t know how they work.

Many people buy highly-specified products but don’t use the full functionality.

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Retailers need to ask consumers what they want from their products; a full understanding is an important part of the selling process.

Constant education

People tend to buy kitchens for aesthetic reasons, so a lot of consumers won’t think about how they’re going to use the appliances within the kitchen, and a lot of retailers avoid asking those questions.

They tend to specify the same products in every kitchen they design because they’re familiar with the product code and they understand the pricing and the reliability of the appliance.

Retailers need to explain how appliances work.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve done a lot of work on training our retailers so they understand that.

People are always surprised at how feature-rich our products are, but we have to try and get our retailers to explain that to the consumer; it’s about constant education.

In-store demonstrations

It’s really important retailers have their wi-fi appliances switched on in-store – we like our smart ovens to be connected in a showroom.

But all our Sense and Sense Premium models have a demonstration mode if not.

At Caple, we have a fully-functional showroom setting, and we also have experts who can do demonstration events in retailers’ showrooms.

When people see how you can operate the oven in-store using a tablet or smartphone it’s interesting and it sets it aside from the more basic products.

We’ve also started doing both online and face-to-face consumer training.

If someone’s bought a wi-fi oven and realised they don’t know how to get the best out of it, we can show them how to do that.

Better time management

A few years ago, we set out to create an oven for the UK market that was wi-fi-enabled, had a number of smart functions and could be controlled by a smartphone or tablet.

It can be operated remotely using our own app; we designed our own interface, the Caple Home app, which we wanted to make as simple as possible to use.

In the UK market, most people will turn their oven on and use the 180°C fan setting, so, if you want to use our smart oven without the smart function, you can switch it on, and press go!

It’s as simple as that.

We also wanted something that was very functional.

You can start the cooking process at 30°C, which can be used to prove dough.

We have a feature called multi-stage cooking – this means you can run a defrost program when you’ve taken something out of the freezer, then you can bake it and, if you want to crisp the top, you can grill it too.

You can also pre-program functions and store them.

Everyone’s time-poor these days. Smart appliances can help you manage your time better, and our wi-fi-enabled ovens are good for bakers or people who do a lot of cooking, as well as those consumers who might want to perform simpler tasks in the kitchen.

You can cook proper, Italian pizza in two minutes and 45 seconds.

I know that, because I cooked 52 pizzas for our staff when we introduced the smart ovens into our range!

Our smart ovens are selling well, but we still sell ovens with traditional knobs on. It’s horses for courses – as ever in the kitchen!

Caple recently won Kitchen Supplier of the Year 2024 at the Fortis Lightside Conference.