«So we will double our turnover in 3 years with Thermomix and Folletto»- Corriere.it

WuppertalIn an increasingly digitized world, it is still said that direct, door-to-door selling is a dying out model. Instead the secret of our success: lThe high quality and the possibility for people to touch it with their own hands, at home, represents an irreplaceable value. The key to demonstration at home is the way we connect with people, creating a community, says Thomas Stoffmehl, CEO of Vorwerk, the historic family-controlled German group, producer of the Kobold and Thermomix, household appliances much loved by Italians.

Italy is the second market after Germany and for Folletto the one with the best performance: +4.4% of sales, to 390 million in 2022, while the food processor (also used by chefs) reached 203 million in turnover (+19.2%), thanks to the boost of a sales network of over 20 thousand people. In other words: our country is worth almost a fifth of the the group’s global revenues of 3.2 billion last year, while sales agents reached 95 thousand globally. Without ads.

Not even the Covid pandemic has stopped the results of Vorwerk, which this year celebrates 140 years of history. For the occasion, the group opened the Wuppertal plant for the first time, which looks more like a medical laboratory than a household appliance factory in terms of order and cleanliness. From September 2019 to December 2022, sales for the Kobold and Thermomix alone grew by more than 500 million euros, Stoffmehl points out. And he insists: Our focus is not on the number of pieces we sell, but on the enthusiasm of the people, who are the foundation of the company. Fundamental training, such as product innovation and durability. This is why our brands have a very high positioning.

Founded in 1883 in Wuppertal, a town between Düsseldorf and Cologne, by brothers Carl and Adolf Vorwerk, the company began as a manufacturer of carpets, to which it soon added looms to make them, later expanding into the manufacture of electric motors for gramophones. In 1929, after the decline in sales of gramophones caused by the advent of the radio, the intuition of a home engineer, in 1929, of use the gramophone’s electric motor to build the first vacuum cleaner, by reinventing it, he saved Vorverk

To keep up with the times, the German group recently launched a new cordless cleaning system, much lighter than the classic Kobold, and will sell from next summer a new version of the robot that cleans floors by itself, more powerful and technological than ever (it can also be controlled from an App on the smartphone).

With new products and a change in commercial strategy, Stoffmehl will once again attack the United States. We tried e-commerce, but it didn’t work. Now we have changed our model and started with direct sales, which were born in the USA, admits Stoffmehl. This is why growing means increasing the sales network of consultants, who are not employees but earn commissions on sales. For some it can be a second job, managed independently and with flexibility, which allows you to round up your salary.

The other direction of development is Asia, starting with South Korea and Japan. Stoffmehl’s target, who arrived at the top of Vorwerk 4 years ago? Reach 5 billion in turnover within the next three years.

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