Ultimate Products announces purchase of Salter.com

Ultimate Products' founder and CEO, Simon Showman

Locally-based Ultimate Products, the owner of a number of leading homeware brands including Salter (the UK's oldest houseware brand, est.1760) and Beldray (est.1872), has announced that it has purchased the Salter.com domain name, which will now take the place of Salterhousewares.co.uk as the Salter brand’s direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) ecommerce channel.

The Group expects that the new site, which is operated entirely by Ultimate Products employees, will benefit from being easier to remember, type and share, as well as ranking higher from an SEO perspective.

Ultimate Products will also soon complete an overhaul of Beldray.com, the DTC channel of Beldray, the Group’s laundry, floorcare, heating and cooling brand.

The new website will be live in August and, as part of this planned improvement, has undergone wide-ranging design and user experience enhancements by the Group’s website and design team.

Ultimate Products operates DTC websites for all of its owned Premier Brands, and is pleased with the growing popularity of these channels which, supported by SEO optimisation and advertising, are seeing an increasing number of visitors.

Online purchases account for 27% of non-food retail sales in the UK, and are expected to reach nearly 50% by 2025.

However, online channels made up just 15.1% of Ultimate Products’ overall revenue in FY21.

Increasing the share of revenue derived from online channels therefore presents a clear growth opportunity for Ultimate Products, which expects such channels to account for 30% of overall revenue in the medium term.

As well as owned DTC channels, the Group’s online revenues also include sales generated on thirdparty multibrand platforms such as Amazon and eBay, which are the biggest contiributors to this segment.

Simon Showman, Chief Executive of Ultimate Products, said: “Our Direct-to-Consumer channels are a lesser-known part of our business, but demonstrate the range of skills across the Ultimate Products team.

"From website design all the way through to order fulfilment, our inhouse talent has the capability to build and operate fully-functioning ecommerce sites, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of customers every year.

"Despite already being a clear market leader, we have high hopes that the Salter brand can continue to grow healthily, particularly in international markets, which will be helped by this recent website acquisition.

"It is through this kind of innovation and agility that our suite of brands continues to grow and take market share.

"Combined with the huge audiences on global platforms such as Amazon and eBay, we are confident that we can achieve our medium term target for online channels to account for nearly a third of our total revenues.”

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