What We Heard at KBB Birmingham: Product Information Challenges Across the KBB Sector

Product information was a recurring theme at KBB Birmingham

We were pleased to attend KBB Birmingham last week and speak with manufacturers, merchants and retailers from across the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms sectors. As product information specialists, it was valuable to hear directly how businesses across the KBB industry are experiencing many of the same challenges through different operational and commercial lenses.

Those conversations reinforced the growing importance of product data across a range of business priorities in the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms market — from supplier onboarding and retailer requirements to eCommerce, catalogue production and internal efficiency. While the detail varied by organisation, the wider direction was clear: product information is becoming a more strategic business capability across the KBB sector, and the demands placed on it are continuing to increase.

KBB merchant requirements are raising the bar for product data

One of the clearest themes from the conversations we had at KBB Birmingham was the growing pressure created by customer-specific data requirements. Larger merchants in the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms sector are increasingly asking suppliers for richer, more structured product information, often in formats tailored to their own systems and processes.

For KBB manufacturers and distributors, especially those without mature internal systems, that creates real strain. Several businesses described the challenge of responding to retailer requests while managing different requirements across multiple customers. In practice, that can mean longer lead times, more admin and greater risk in customer relationships.

When KBB merchants expect complete, accurate and well-structured product data as standard, fragmented or highly manual processes quickly start to show their limits.

Fragmented product data remains a common issue in the KBB industry

When we asked how product data is currently being managed, the answers were familiar: spreadsheets, websites, Dropbox, APIs, incumbent systems, disconnected platforms and a mix of tools spread across different teams. In some cases, product data was described as being all over the place. In others, it moved through multiple people before it could be updated, approved or shared with customers and downstream channels.

Several businesses in the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms sector had no single source of truth at all.

That fragmentation creates more than inconvenience. It creates duplication, uncertainty and delay. When KBB product data sits across disparate systems and individual files, every update becomes harder to control. Teams end up reworking the same information for different channels, manually producing catalogues, reformatting data for specific customers, or chasing information that should already have been captured upstream.

The more people, files and systems involved, the harder it becomes for KBB businesses to move quickly and confidently.

Supplier onboarding is a major product data challenge in KBB

Another strong theme was supplier and product onboarding. For some businesses, onboarding was the hardest part of product data management altogether. One conversation described it as almost marketplace-like in its complexity, given the challenge of collecting, structuring and validating information from many different suppliers. Another simply described supplier onboarding as a nightmare.

This matters because onboarding is where many KBB product data problems start. If supplier data arrives incomplete, inconsistently formatted or without clear governance, those issues carry through into every downstream process — from product launches and customer submissions to ecommerce, catalogue generation and retailer-specific requests.

For kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms businesses, the challenge is not only where product data is stored, but how it is collected, validated and governed from the start.

Across the KBB sector, different businesses are feeling similar pressure

One of the most interesting things about the conversations at KBB Birmingham was how widely these issues appeared across businesses at very different stages of maturity. Some were still heavily reliant on spreadsheets and manual processes. Some had partial systems in place, such as a PIM used for website data but not fully accessible to commercial teams. Others were larger KBB organisations with substantial SKU counts and significant online revenue, but still without a centralised and trusted source of product information.

Different scale, different systems — same underlying strain.

That matters because the issue is not simply whether a KBB business has software or not. It is whether product information can be managed in a way that supports the business as complexity grows. A fragmented setup may be workable for a while, but the cracks begin to show when supplier onboarding becomes harder, retailer requirements become more demanding, and the same product data has to support more channels, customers and teams.

KBB product data issues do not stay contained

Some conversations also highlighted that inefficiency around product information does not stay neatly contained within product data teams. In one case, broader manual processes had created an “army of people manually keying orders”, showing how disconnected information flows can drive inefficiency far beyond the data itself. In another, limitations in existing systems were linked to concerns around forecasting, product management capability and the wider business impact of fragmented information.

Not every challenge raised was strictly a PIM issue, but many pointed to the same underlying reality: when KBB product data is fragmented, the operational drag spreads well beyond administration.

What starts as a data challenge quickly becomes a business challenge — affecting responsiveness, workload, lead times and the ability to support growth across kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms businesses.

The bigger takeaway for kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms businesses

The wider takeaway from KBB Birmingham is clear. Product information is no longer just a back-office task or a website content requirement. It increasingly affects how quickly KBB businesses can onboard products, how efficiently they can respond to customer requirements, how consistently they can serve multiple channels, and how much manual effort they absorb along the way.

Across the conversations we had, the common thread was not simply that businesses in the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms sector want better data. It was that they need a more scalable way to manage growing complexity. As merchant expectations continue to rise, fragmented spreadsheets, disconnected systems and manual handoffs become harder to sustain.

The KBB businesses best placed to respond will be those that can bring product information under greater control, reduce duplication, improve onboarding, and create a more reliable foundation for every downstream use of that data.

Final thought

KBB Birmingham reinforced what many businesses across the kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms sector are already feeling: product information is becoming a bigger operational and commercial priority. The question is no longer whether the pressure is increasing. It is whether existing processes are equipped to keep up.