Chapter 07

Partnerships

There is a version of this business where the installer pays £5 a pack, and a version where a supplier pays for the packs and the installer pays nothing. The second one is worth ten times the first, and it is a harder sale.

What matters

The idea that a supplier should generate consumer leads for its trade customers is not novel to this industry. Two live UK programmes already promise it.S47 What is missing everywhere is the mover trigger and the picture of the buyer's own room.
One supplier in our own catalogue spends very nearly its entire gross margin on demand generation for its dealers, and has publicly funded regional advertising for them.S48 That is the shape of the buyer.
The single most valuable non-engineering thing available is a written data agreement with an agency group or a CRM vendor. It solves the data problem in chapter 10 and it is business development, not code.S43
The Howdens play is documented separately and is not this year's work. A summary is here with a pointer, because it changes what "partnership" means at the top end.

7.1 The four kinds of partner, ranked by what they are worth

Kind	What they give	What they want	Worth	Difficulty
An estate agency group or a CRM vendor	Lawful access to listing photographs, descriptions and floorplans, with permission	A retention feature for their agents, and vendor-side differentiation	Existential. Without it the product has a ceiling set by chapter 10	High. Per-agent, revocable, and needs a lawyer
An appliance or sanitaryware brand	Money, and a dealer list we cannot otherwise obtain	Their products specified into more kitchens and bathrooms	Very high. It changes who pays	Medium. The budget exists but is inside confidential trading agreements
A buying group or trade body	Distribution to a membership	A member benefit that makes membership stickier	High for reach, low for revenue	Low to medium. Start here
A trade supplier at scale	Volume that changes the print economics entirely	Sales per existing depot or branch	Transformative and slow	Very high. See 7.5

7.2 Appliance and sanitaryware brands, which is where the money is

Our own catalogue already carries 340 products across 35 kitchen brands and 39 bathroom brands, with 338 records holding verified millimetre dimensions, and the pack already credits every product an installer picked in its small print.S4 That small print is the co-marketing hook and it already exists.

The one where the case is strongest, and it was a surprise

Quooker

Quooker UK's filed accounts show turnover of £83.99m, gross profit of £21.25m and administrative expenses of £17.92m, across 4,500-plus UK dealers.S48 In other words it spends very nearly its entire gross margin on demand generation. Its managing director is on record funding co-branded dealer displays, dealer incentives, millions a year into national advertising, and, during lockdown, explicitly free regional advertising for dealers.S48

The pitch writes itself: a supplier that already buys regional advertising for its dealers is being offered a cheaper, better-targeted version of something it already funds, aimed at people who have just bought a house. And the product already carries Quooker with verified dimensions and already credits it on the pack.S4

The tiered partner programmes, which are the route in

Brand	Programme, and what it already gives dealers	The angle
NEFF (BSH)	MasterPartner: showroom display support and extra discounts. BSH also runs a free digital marketing toolbox for partners. BSH Home Appliances Ltd filed turnover of £795.0m with distribution costs of £145.5m, which is 18.3%S48	The largest distribution-cost line of any brand checked. A digital toolbox that produces a leaflet for a house that just sold is an upgrade to something they already run.
AEG (Electrolux)	CIH Partner Program: enhanced rebate, display deals, promotional collateral and marketing plans to drive consumer engagementS48	"Promotional collateral" is literally the product. But note the trap below.
Miele	Built-In Partner. Miele Company Ltd paid dividends of £5.0m against profit before tax of £6.8mS48	Little discretionary capacity. Lower priority, and the "Chartered Agent" scheme people cite is Australian and Canadian, not UK.
Bosch, Siemens, Smeg, Bora, Fisher & Paykel	All in the catalogue with verified dimensionsS4	Second wave. Approach after one brand has said yes and there is a case study.

Two cautions, both of which will come up in the meeting. First, AEG's designer rewards pay points to the individual designer, not to the business's marketing budget, and that money competes with us for the same supplier pound.S48 Second, no standing published cash marketing fund exists at any of these brands. The terms sit inside confidential annual trading agreements, so absence of published evidence is not evidence of absence, and it is also not evidence of presence. Do not build a forecast on a fund nobody has confirmed exists.

The offer to a brand, in one page

Every week, houses sell within a few miles of your dealers. Their kitchens are dated and the new owners know it. We put a printed pack through those doors showing that actual kitchen, remodelled, with your appliances in it, under your dealer's name and phone number. It costs about two pounds a house. You are already funding dealer displays and regional advertising. This is the same money, aimed at a person who has just moved in rather than a person driving past a poster. We would like to run it in one region, for twenty of your dealers, for three months, and give you the response numbers.

Why the ask is a region and not a contract. Nobody in this industry has response data for this campaign, including us.S15 A three-month regional trial converts the two weakest assumptions in the whole business into measurements, and the measurements are worth more than the fee. It is also small enough to be approved by a marketing manager rather than a board.

7.3 KBB studios, buying groups and trade bodies

These do not bring money. They bring the one thing money cannot buy here, which is a list. Chapter 05 exists because there is no list.

BIFIS, formerly BiKBBI

The installer trade body, renamed the British Institute of Fitted Interiors Specialists on 1 October 2025.S14 Its own survey is the source of the 80%-sole-trader and 60%-would-leave figures in chapter 02, which means it holds the population we cannot enumerate. One of the firms in chapter 05 holds its Installation Business of the Year award for 2026, which is a warm introduction sitting in the target list.

KBSA

Roughly 205 retail members, counted by hand from the directory.S18 A quality subset, exactly our profile, and one of the Midlands firms in chapter 05 is a member.

The buying groups

KBBG, part of DER KREIS, launched mybathroomspecialist.com on 30 June 2025 explicitly to drive bathroom leads to its member retailers, and its managing director called it a powerful tool to generate quality leads.S47 The site was checked in September 2026 and has a price estimator, brochure requests, a specialist directory and a home-measure request, and no visualiser at all.S21

PWS's Second Nature Partner Programme already promises retailers direct consumer sales leads generated through the website and the brand's wider marketing presence, plus a personalised where-to-buy page.S47

The read: these organisations have already decided that generating consumer leads for their trade members is their job. They have built the directory and the estimator. They have not built the render or the mail. That is a partnership, not a competition.

7.4 The estate agency route, which is the important one

Chapter 10 sets out why the current data supply is not lawful at volume. The route out is agent-side, and it is documented rather than hypothetical.

Route	What it carries	How access works	Catch
Vebra, Alto and Jupix (Property Software Group)	A Client Feed Export API letting clients retrieve their own data in real time, with instructions to download the images and referenced files, and a paragraphs element carrying the room-by-room marketing copyS43	Basic auth to a bearer token, with a per-client feed id scoped to specific branches	Per agent, revocable at will. And note the irony worth using in a conversation: this is Houseful, which is Zoopla's own parent.
Reapit Foundations	Properties and property images, fetched with embedded images in a paged response, plus created and modified webhooksS43	OpenID Connect, agent-installable and revocable by design. Rate limits 20 a second, 250,000 a day	Same per-agent shape. Uninstalling revokes immediately.
Hometrack	"Property Listings Data" powered by Zoopla dataS43	Commercial, enquiry-gated	Whether it includes photographs and marketing descriptions is stated nowhere public. It requires one phone call and it is the single most commercially decisive unanswered question in this business.

What an agent agreement does and does not fix. It fixes the portal terms and it gives a defensible chain of permission. It does not cure the photographer's underlying copyright, because the agent may hold only an implied licence itself.S32 So any agreement must carry a warranty of ownership or authority to license, plus an indemnity. And Rightmove's agent-facing membership terms reportedly vest proprietorship of the uploaded copy in Rightmove, which would determine whether an agent can consent to onward use at all. That document has not been obtained and it should be, before anyone relies on this route.S43

The one-line version to remember. Signing one regional agency group or one CRM vendor to a written agreement covering photographs, descriptions and floorplans for the purpose of generating remodelling visualisations is worth more than any feature on the roadmap. It is business development and legal work, and it is the gate on everything else.

7.5 The Howdens play, summarised

There is a separate internal research document on selling or licensing this stack to a trade kitchen supplier. It is long, it is sourced to annual reports and filings, and it should be read before anybody acts on this section. It is research and strategy only, no outreach has been made, and none is authorised.S45

The five things worth carrying from it

They have the objective and no product

Howdens names, as one of four strategic initiatives, developing digital platforms to deliver productivity gains and more leads for depots and customers. Across three annual reports and every 2025-26 results document there is no leads-delivered metric, no target and no actual.S45 A named strategic pillar with nothing behind it.

They buy rather than build

No CIO, CTO or CDO on the executive committee, no engineering organisation, no GitHub. In June 2026 they paid £390m for DIY Kitchens explicitly to access non-trade consumers through self-service planning, design and ordering tools, and are running it separately.S45

The arithmetic that makes the meeting

1,144,530 UK completions divided by 893 UK depots is 1,282 sold homes per depot catchment per year, about twenty-five a week, every week, that they currently do nothing with.S45 Recent movers appear nowhere in their published strategy.

They already advertise their customers' businesses

In March 2026 they ran "Proud to Fit", buying billboards and bus backs featuring their own trade customers' businesses.S45 The pack is the same idea at a fraction of the cost per contact, aimed at people who have just bought a house.

And the four things not to do, from the same document. Do not approach them now, because the data problem is unsolved and a first meeting spent on legal risk does not get a second. Do not pitch it as CAD or a design tool, because they design for free in every depot and you would be pitching them their own service.S30 Do not sell it as an AI render product, because AI staging is already commoditised at around $29 a month. And do not overstate how long the software took to build, because it is checkable.S45

The recommended shape, if it ever happens. Not an acquisition. A paid, fixed-scope, time-boxed white-label pilot across fifteen to thirty depots in one region, measured against matched control depots. It is the only shape that does not require anybody to value the software, and it converts the two weakest assumptions in the model into measurements.S45 If Howdens passes, the same evidence pack goes to Wren, who sell direct to consumers and therefore keep the lead themselves, though they build rather than buy.

7.6 What we do not do

No exclusivity in a first agreement. With a brand, a group, an agency or a supplier. Exclusivity given away before value is proven is value destroyed.
No white-labelling before the data agreement. Putting a large brand's name on packs built from photographs we do not have permission to use moves the risk from a small company's acceptable to a large company's unacceptable, and their legal function will find it in the first hour.S45
No claims about a partner's own numbers. Several of the brands above do not publish design volumes, average invoice values or marketing funds, and quoting a figure at somebody about their own business is how a meeting ends.
No approach to a portal as a partner while the terms position is unresolved. Chapter 10 first.

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