How Caesarstone UK and Ireland is becoming more customer-centric

In recent weeks, the leading surfaces brand Caesarstone UK & ROI have released significant announcements aimed at continuing their programme of customer service improvements. Edward Smith, Managing Director for Caesarstone UK & ROI provides an update on the reaction from the market, and what lies ahead for Caesarstone in the coming months.

At the start of this quarter, Caesarstone announced a radical restructuring of your pricing strategy in the market. What has been the early response from your channel partners? 

ES: Caesarstone has always been focused on delivering premium surfaces into the market at competitive price-points. For us, the restructure had two primary aspirations: firstly, to simplify the understanding of our pricing in the market – we wanted to highlight in the new structure how our channel partners can find fully-warrantied trend and class-dealing designs from Caesarstone at every price-point.

5100 Vanilla Noir from Caesarstone’s Essentials Range

Secondly, we wanted to ensure the pricing of our expanded Essentials range of best-sellers, previously reserved for commercial projects only, is now available across the market. We want customers to have the very best price we could offer on every product – this adjustment provides substantial savings against single slab rates and we’re delighted that leading national fabricators have used this restructuring opportunity to place volume orders, making significant savings, to hold inventory stock of our fastest-moving designs.

We also took the decision, in spite of the economic headwinds and increased production costs we’re absorbing, to reposition leading designs, including Rugged Concrete, Empira White and Bianco Drift, into lower price groups. These signature designs have always drawn interest from discerning designers and trend-conscious kitchen buyers, and this reposition means they can be considered for projects with tighter budgets. 

Caesarstone 5151 Empira White Mineral Surface

We’ve been overwhelmed with the positive response to the changes and can already see these savings passed through the value chain, offering value to studios and the end-consumer, and with many fabricators holding stock directly, offers shorter-lead time from the point of order to installation.

You’ve also made some changes with your transport and logistics structure; can you explain the motivations and early response? 

ES: Absolutely! Over the last 12 months, we’ve enhanced numerous areas of our inventory management, planning and customer delivery schedules, as part of our continuous assessment of operations to ensure that we are serving our customers and channel partners in the best possible way.

Last month we announced an expanded and improved operations and logistics network design that offers rapid scalability. We’ve added new additions to our vehicle fleet, including 2 new 26 tonne trucks, additional support from Swains Transport for better comprehensive national coverage, and recruiting more colleagues to our in-house team, including a dedicated transport manager. All of this represents our continued investment into the UK and ROI markets to become ever more customer-centric.

The early response from our fabricator network on the changes announced has been extremely encouraging, we know our partners are looking forward to the communicated service improvements these changes will bring that highlight the “Caesarstone difference”.

Your new transport manager isn’t the only recruit joining the Caesarstone business in recent months, can you provide more details on your expanding team?

ES: The Caesarstone team has grown significantly since our launch as a direct business in the UK, and we are always looking to recruit, passionate customer-focused colleagues to support our ambitions.

Since the turn-of-the year, we’ve on-boarded new field sales representatives for our retail partners, new national account managers for an expanded support team for our housebuilders and developers partners, a new Customer Service Team Leader for our UK Head Office, and further recruits in our office-based account and sales management team, showcasing the added value Caesarstone’s hybrid sales model offers to our channel partners that combines the strengths of both office-based support and field-based face-to-face account management.

Wow – so lots going on at Caesarstone already in 2025 and positive to hear in what are challenging market conditions for the KBB industry. What’s next for the brand in the coming months – will the speed of change slow as we get into the second half of the year?

ES: Not at all – if anything, we’re ramping up over the next 6 months! All of the changes we’ve announced represent improvements in service and support, but of course, Caesarstone has always been known as an innovator in product design and material science, and following significant launches last year across our mineral and porcelain surfaces, we’ve got much more to come…

Caesarstone 4011 Cloudburst Concrete ICON advanced fusion surface

In the short-term, following the launch of our ICON technology and our new material category of advanced fusion surfaces that are crystalline silica-free and have increased recycled material content, we’ve got two dynamic surfaces that are a few short weeks away from unveiling, whilst we will continue to transition more of our best-sellers to this new formula.

Further innovations include two new Calacatta inspired designs that meet the market trend for bold, vibrant marble motifs whilst remaining affordable for most schemes, Calacatta Stillstorm debuting in our Essentials range, with Calacatta Nectar debuting in the competitively positioned Price Group 3 in our Premium series.

Caesarstone’s newly launched 5116 Calacatta Nectar

Further ahead in 2025, we also planning for the reveal of exciting new Porcelain surfaces in our countertop category, and further thickness options for some of our most popular Porcelain designs.

Last, but certainly not least, and in response to significant demand from across the KBB sector, is an expansion of the application base for our surfaces, bringing new ways in which designers and homeowners will be able to integrate the well-known Caesarstone brand, and the elevated quality of our surfaces, into their projects.

We’re excited to see how the industry will incorporate our surfaces that combine the striking aesthetic tones, textures and motifs found in our popular countertop portfolio with the same dependable levels of performance and reliability, into other areas of the home with these new innovations.