The Steel CodCast

The spec sheet will give you the capacity number. It won't tell you whether the drum is going to clean your clothes.
Anthony and Jon dig into the engineering of the front load washer drum — the part of the machine that's doing more work than any single spec communicates. What's actually responsible for cleaning (and why the drum either helps or gets in the way), what tumble arc is and why it matters, how drum surface material affects the wash in ways most brands haven't bothered to address, why capacity is the BTU of the laundry world — easy to market, misleading in practice — and why wash rotation speed almost never makes the spec sheet even though it probably should.
Plus how salespeople should actually apply all of this without turning a washer conversation into a physics lecture.
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Five mailbag questions this week — and some of them will feel very familiar.
What do you do when a coworker tells a customer that a $12,000 range and a $2,000 range are "basically the same thing because they both cook food"? Why does Steel Cod spend so much time on luxury and independent brands when GE, LG, and Samsung are what's actually on most floors? After eight years in luxury appliances, what does it take to finally crack the built-in coffee conversation? Is manufacturer training — the kind where someone from corporate explains how their product should be sold — actually making salespeople worse? And if you're seven months into your career, outselling people who've been on the floor for a decade, and your manager tells you to slow down, why would you?
Jon has answers for all of them.
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The Steel Cod Retail Council results are in — and this week they genuinely surprised Jon.
Shannon and Jon dig into four questions from the council: outdoor grills and what it costs you when a customer mentions a brand you've never heard of, a question about OEM that apparently needed a definition before anyone could answer it, which brands council members are quietly moving away from and why, and the biggest one — who actually owns affordable luxury in your market? The answers came back all over the map, and they challenge some assumptions Jon walked in with.
On the floor confidence question: Samsung, Dacor, and Jenn-Air were predictable. Thermador was not — and Jon has a detailed theory about what's behind it that goes well beyond the product itself.
On affordable luxury: brands that Jon considers luxury — Fulgor Milano, Dacor, SKS — are showing up as affordable luxury in certain markets. The takeaway is uncomfortable: national brand strategy means almost nothing if local execution is inconsistent. And with tariffs compressing the gap between affordable and true luxury, the category lines are getting harder to hold everywhere.
Also this week: Café is posting real growth and may deserve a second look, and Jon asks whether Steel Cod should publish a public brand tier list.
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📧 Questions for the mailbag? Send them to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F📧 Apply to Join the Retail Council Here: https://tally.so/r/vGGdq0

Every salesperson has brands they believe in — and brands they don't. That's not the problem. The problem is when that bias starts showing up in ways that don't serve the customer.
Jon Beresford and Anthony Fors dig into one of the most common and least-talked-about challenges on the sales floor: how do you talk about a brand you don't love without coming across as dismissive, biased, or dishonest? And what do you say when a customer looks you in the eye and asks, "Do you like this brand?"
Jon walks through the full framework — the wrong approaches most salespeople don't even realize they're doing, how to separate your opinion from the customer's situation, why knowing a brand well enough to speak to both sides is non-negotiable, and why there really is a customer for every product if you can figure out who it was built for.
This one is worth sharing with every salesperson on your team.
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True has been making commercial refrigeration since 1945 — and they're the largest commercial refrigeration manufacturer in North America. So what happened when they brought that same standard to the residential world?
Jon and Anthony sit down with Andrew Shed, Sales & Marketing Manager at True Caliber, to dig into what separates a brand that actually came from commercial from every other brand that just borrowed the language. They talk forced air refrigeration, the engineering decisions that trace directly back to True's commercial DNA, and why the question "what can I get away with?" simply doesn't exist in their vocabulary.
They also get into True's curated color program (Jon has opinions about RAL catalogs), the panel-ready question and how salespeople should handle it, and the True Caliber acquisition — what bringing Caliber Grills into the True family means for the premium outdoor kitchen space, including the Rockwell Grill and what's coming next.
Plus: Jon makes his case for why True passed Sub-Zero "a long time ago."
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This one started with Retail Council feedback that Jon didn't agree with. So instead of just saying so, he and Anthony built an episode around it.
The matchup: Kalamazoo Echo vs. Lynx gas grill. Lynx has a legitimate floor reputation — salespeople are comfortable with it, customers know the brand, and there are real reasons it holds the default position in the high-end outdoor grill conversation. But the Kalamazoo Echo is a different kind of product, and the standard way of comparing grills — BTUs, spec sheet versus spec sheet — doesn't just fall short here. It actively misleads.
Jon and Anthony get into construction, cleaning, and everything that happens between cooks (because every grill cooks — it's the rust, the degradation, the 20-minute post-cook maintenance that actually separates them). They cover what to ask a customer who's already been through a few grills. They get into why the spec sheet comparison skews in the wrong direction. And they cover the fully optioned Echo, which goes somewhere in price that Jon describes as a place where essentially no one lives.
Then Jon picks a winner.
New episodes every weekday. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Seven questions. One mailbag. Shannon pulls them, Jon answers them live.
This week's batch covers a lot of ground. A dealer who had three customers in one month come in completely wrong, refuse to listen, and buy anyway — and needed to know how to handle that without losing their mind. A dealer whose manufacturer partners keep smiling and walking away when they see the Power Index data, and wanted to know what it's actually showing that they're not willing to sit with. A listener wondering if the Appliance Buying Clarity content means Steel Cod is going direct to consumer. A loyal morning listener bummed about the switch to five days and wanting a real explanation. A new salesperson getting pushed back by the old guard on their floor and not sure what to do about it.
Then the two big ones: whether anyone is ever actually going to challenge Sub-Zero and Wolf, and why the first step from mass premium up to luxury is so much harder to make happen than the step from affordable luxury up to true luxury.
Jon answers all seven. Shannon reacts to most of them. New episodes every weekday. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

We missed a week. So this episode has eight questions instead of four — two weeks of Steel Cod Retail Council answers in one sitting.
Shannon and Jon work through all of them. Who's actually challenging Blackstone on the outdoor griddle and whether anyone has solved both the story and the price point at the same time. Why Fisher & Paykel is surging in Canada and stagnant in the US, and what the brand is missing that SKS and Thermidor have figured out. What Jon really thought about John Howells and the ILVE conversation — and where he thinks the brand needs to fight before it starts swinging at Wolf and La Cornue.
They also cover what the council confirmed about ASKO and KitchenAid (the two most underappreciated dishwashers on any floor), why SKS is the brand Jon's watching most closely going into the next couple of years despite loving the product, what the Power Index is showing on Miele cooking right now, why you should always show true luxury before affordable luxury ever enters the conversation, and the council's honest read on Electrolux — a brand with real product in it that doesn't seem to know what it is.
Eight questions. No filter. New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Every premium dishwasher on the market publishes a sanitize cycle temperature. 155 degrees. 161 degrees. The customer reads the number, assumes that's what's hitting their dishes, and moves on. And in most cases, they're wrong.
Jon and Anthony go deep on the engineering reality of dishwasher water temperature — what actually happens to heat between the element and the dish surface, and why it matters more than anyone on the sales floor is talking about. They walk through every point where temperature is lost: the pump, the distribution manifold, the spray arm, the air gap. They explain why two machines with identical rated temperatures can produce completely different sanitization results at the dish surface. And they explain why Bosch's flow-through heater isn't a marginal improvement over the competition — it's a fundamentally different engineering philosophy.
They also get into why the third rack is the weakest sanitization position in nearly every dishwasher on the market, how Miele addresses that problem specifically, and the three questions every salesperson should be asking about every machine they're carrying right now.
The baby bottle moment. The KitchenAid vs. Bosch close. The NSF certification story. It's all in here, and it's the kind of conversation that makes a salesperson the most credible person in a customer's entire shopping experience.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

"Attainable luxury" is one of the more loaded phrases in this industry. Everybody positions themselves with some version of it. So when we sat down with Mason Watkins, Senior Director of Marketing at ZLINE Kitchen and Bath, we asked him to define it the way it actually matters — from an engineering and product standpoint, not a tagline standpoint.
From there, the conversation got real. Anthony and Jon brought Mason the Steel Cod Retail Council survey result: some independent dealers said they wouldn't bring ZLINE up even if a customer asked — not because of the product, but because of service history and post-sale experience. Mason addressed it directly. They also got into ZLINE's big box distribution — Lowe's, Home Depot, Costco, Amazon — and what that actually means for the independent dealers carrying the brand alongside those channels. And they covered the Consumer Reports result where ZLINE ranges outperformed more expensive competitors in testing, and what product philosophy is producing that.
They also spent time on the parts of the ZLINE lineup most people overlook — refrigeration, dishwashers, hoods, and now plumbing — and where those categories actually stand.
Mason answered everything. New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.