CR Smith, Scotland’s leading home improvements company, is seeing a surge in enquiries as customer confidence picks up following the end of full lockdown.
Compared to this time last year, enquiry levels are up 22% from customers looking to extend their homes, while FIX, the company’s repair business, is seeing a 23% uplift, primarily from customers of companies that have gone bust leaving them without a guarantee.
The Fife-based company, which operates its own state-of-the-art manufacturing plant, focused on innovation during lockdown, starting with its products. Its flagship Lorimer window has been further developed, building in greater efficiencies and developing its aesthetics even further.
With in-house architectural expertise and experience, CR Smith is also designing new styles of home extensions, blending space and light to meet the rise in customer demand to add an additional room or extend an existing room for open plan living areas.
Alongside this, the firm is now offering customers a new digital first design process which includes full 3D architectural drawings. This new model allows customers to receive visuals of their designs and initial quotations for their projects entirely online.
The move to greater use of digital technologies and a planned new website is also allowing the company to build in new levels of efficiency, bringing down costs across the operation.
Gerard Eadie, CBE, bought CR Smith as a 22-year-old in 1974 and continues to lead the Scottish-based company. By using lockdown to drive forward innovation, he believes the company is in a strong position for what lies ahead.
He said:
“As a long-established company, we have been taking a pragmatic approach to ensure our business is resilient to the knocks inevitably landed by the pandemic. But necessity is also the mother of invention and this crisis has forced both us and our customers to think and act differently.
“Lockdown and more time at home has got our customers thinking in real detail about what they need and want for their homes. They have great ideas for home offices and transforming kitchen areas to open plan family rooms and we have responded by developing a 3D architectural virtual service, so they can bring these ideas to life from the comfort of their own home and without charge.
“We have had to adapt to the uncertainties of the new business landscape and chart a new course forward for our staff and our customers. The past few months have shown us that we can be more efficient for our customers and that there are tangible opportunities in the home extension market and across our repairs business.”
