The Steel CodCast

"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.

The spin speed number gets sold the same way BTUs do. Someone quotes it, it sounds impressive, and the conversation moves on. But the spin cycle is doing something very specific to the clothes inside that drum, and the RPM figure doesn't tell that story.
Jon and Anthony dig into the actual physics of what happens during a high-speed spin — what the G-forces involved are doing to fabric over time, why the balance between moisture extraction and fabric protection is harder to engineer than it looks, and why G-Force is the real measuring stick that never appears on any spec sheet you'll ever be handed.
They also get into the dryer relationship — the "higher spin equals less dryer time" equation that's true as far as it goes, and complicated beyond that — which brands are actually engineering around the balance well, and whether meaningful spin speed flexibility is even available in full-size machines or if that's still mostly a compact conversation.
It's one of those topics that sounds simple until it isn't. And once you understand it, the RPM number on the spec sheet is never going to mean the same thing again.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Single vs. double oven. Sounds obvious. Pick the one that fits your kitchen and your budget, right? Not quite.
Jon and Anthony dig into why this is actually one of the more consequential — and most mishandled — decisions in the kitchen planning process. The double oven has real appeal: visually, functionally, and from an aspirational standpoint. But the costs that come with it go well beyond the price tag, and the cabinetry reality alone has a way of completely reshaping the conversation.
More importantly: there's a third option that almost never comes up — even though it should be presented to customers nearly every single time this question is on the table. Jon and Anthony walk through what it is, when it makes sense, and why the industry tends to skip right past it.
If you're a salesperson, this is the blueprint for how this conversation should actually go. If you're a customer, this is what you should've been told before you decided.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The standard induction presentation goes like this: here's the wattage, here's what boost does, here's the bridging element, here are your zones. And it ends without ever touching the thing that's going to matter most when that cooktop is actually in someone's kitchen.
Jon and Anthony take the induction category apart feature by feature in this one — not to trash the usual talking points, but to reorder them into the hierarchy that actually serves the customer. Wattage gets examined. Boost gets honest. Bridging gets put in its place. Zone configuration gets the conversation it usually doesn't. And then Jon puts together the decision framework that every customer should actually be using when they're evaluating induction cooktops.
The punchline: power management — the feature that used to start arguments at manufacturer training events, the one that salespeople would almost skip because it felt like a buzzkill after the boost demo — is where the conversation has to start. Not as a letdown. As the most useful and honest thing you can tell a customer before they buy.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Here's a question nobody on the appliance sales floor is asking: when was the last time you actually talked to your service technician?
Anthony and Jon dig into why the service tech — not the experienced salesperson, not the tenured rep, not the product manager — is the single most valuable source of product intelligence in this industry. And why most dealers have completely cut themselves off from it.
The case they make is pretty simple. Everything the sales floor knows about a product is perspective. It comes from people with a financial interest in making the product sound good. The technician's knowledge is something else entirely — it's built from thousands of service calls in real homes, on real products, under real conditions that real families created. They know which compressors go first. Which control boards are a weak point in specific product generations. Which brands have parts two years after purchase and which ones are getting hunted on eBay. And which products they open up five years later that still look exactly the way they did on install day. That last list, by the way, is a very short one.
Jon and Anthony walk through the structural reasons this gap exists, how manufacturer relationships keep the feedback from ever reaching the floor, and exactly what to do about it. Spoiler: it's one monthly meeting and one question.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

John Howells didn't come up through the manufacturer side. He came up through big box retail, through Best Buy's premium Pac Sales division, through independent dealers up and down the East Coast — learning the industry the way most manufacturer reps never have to. That's exactly why ILVE brought him in.
In this episode, John sits down with Anthony and Jon for one of the most transparent brand conversations in recent Steel CodCast memory. He talks about what ILVE actually is — an Italian luxury cooking brand built around customization, storytelling, and 60-plus years of heritage — and what it has been navigating in North America. The previous distributor. The bankruptcy. The service reputation that followed. And what ILVE USA has been building since 2024 to change that story.
He gets into the configurator that made 100,000 SKUs sellable with confidence. The near-10% margin increase. The near-tripled customer service staff. The millions in parts inventory on the East Coast. And the $15,000 range situation where he took the loss — personally — because it was the right thing to do.
He also talks about the shift the brand is seeing right now: from push to demand. From dealers having to explain it, to consumers walking in and asking for it by name.
John's rule of three: follow up, training, service. And his north star: Sub-Zero's qualitative standard, not just as competition, but as the benchmark.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Here's something nobody talks about on the showroom floor: the door gasket. Most salespeople walk right past it. Most customers never touch it. And yet it's quietly determining how hard your compressor works, how stable the temperature inside your fridge actually is, and how long the food on your door shelves stays fresh — every single day, for the next 10 to 15 years.
Jon and Anthony dig into the engineering reality behind refrigerator door gaskets in this one — what they're actually doing, why most of them are spec'd to a warranty threshold instead of a performance threshold, and what separates a gasket that's been seriously engineered (Sub-Zero, Miele) from one that just met the minimum bar. They also walk through three hands-on tests you can run on any fridge on your floor right now, and break down when this conversation is worth having with a customer — and when it probably isn't.
It's a deep cut. It's exactly the kind of thing your customers have never heard before. And once you understand it, you'll never look at a fridge door the same way again.
New episodes every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Shannon and Jon Beresford are back with another Mailbag — six listener questions, and Jon has to answer all of them.
The first one sounds simple until you think about it: does Steel Cod train salespeople to sell better for the customer or the dealer? Jon's answer is straightforward — always the customer — but the reasoning behind it is worth sitting with. The floor exists because customers walk through the door. Every commission traces back to a customer deciding something was worth spending money on. A retailer prioritizing their own interests in a sales conversation has a leadership problem, not a sales problem.
The second question goes deeper: what's the real existential threat to independent retail? Jon goes beyond the salesperson who stops learning and gets more specific. The threat is stopping at the layer of information anyone can pull up online and thinking that's enough. The irreplaceable salesperson knows how to curate information — can tell the difference between what actually moves a customer and what's conversation filler. They know installation pitfalls. They understand engineering philosophy and brand intent. None of that is downloadable. And the gap between what that salesperson knows and what a prepared customer already knows before they walk in is closing faster than the channel is giving credit for.
Question three is a management question: half my team connects beautifully with customers but avoids the technical side; the other half knows everything but can't connect. Which half do I build around and which do I fix first? Jon: build around the connectors. Every time. The ability to make someone feel genuinely understood is not teachable through instruction. The technical-but-disconnected salesperson isn't an asset — they're a liability. Give them a real chance to change. Most won't. Move on when it's clear. The team that remains is more valuable without them.
Question four asks whether appliance retail belongs in the plumbing game. Jon says yes — but only the non-commodity version. He walks through what he'd put on the ideal floor: the heaviest gauge stainless sink, fireclay for a completely different material and aesthetic, The Galley workstation sink. Composr disposal — the first one he'd actually want to show off. Waterstone faucets — hand finished, customizable, stops designers mid-sentence. The through line: stories you can't get anywhere else. Restraint is the whole point.
Question five asks what the impossible customer looks like and when salespeople have permission to walk away. Jon's answer: that customer doesn't exist in your showroom. Everyone who physically walks through the door walked in because something is unresolved. The difficult customer is one you haven't understood yet. Permission to walk away from someone standing in front of you is never something Jon will give.
The bonus question: how do you know the difference between a brand worth betting on early and one that just has a good pitch? Never listen to the pitch — every brand has one. Know your floor, your customer, where the product actually slots in the flow of how your people sell. The right brand isn't the best brand in the abstract. It's the one that answers a specific question for your specific customer.
New episodes Monday through Friday. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.
🔗 Referenced this episode:→ The Salesperson Who Stops Learning: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-mb4gr-1b02ac9→ SCRC showroom inspiration episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-uh3pz-1b11fc9

Shannon kicks things off with an announcement: The Steel CodCast is moving from seven days a week to five. The weekend episodes are stopping after this one. The lineup stays the same — Mailbag, sales deep dives, guest episodes, and the Retail Council — just tighter and more focused, Monday through Friday.
Then Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford get into four Retail Council questions that cover a lot of ground.
The first one asks which brand failed at the luxury repositioning — and the council's answer is unambiguous: JennAir. Not struggling, not stumbling — failed. Availability, support, reliability, and product execution came back as consistent themes. Monogram was the overwhelming answer for who got it right. Anthony has spent time inside JennAir and respects the people there, and he says that. But his take is clear: they're being asked to win a fight their parent company has never fully equipped them to win. Whirlpool committed to the marketing story before the infrastructure existed to support it. The Culinary column refrigeration failure at launch is the cleanest example of that gap. The Noir interior forces an aesthetic on the buyer instead of offering the choice that luxury buyers expect. One council member floated the idea that Whirlpool would have been better off pushing KitchenAid up to the luxury tier instead of acquiring JennAir — Anthony thought about it and found it hard to argue against, even though the mass brand association problem would have followed them there too.
Kalamazoo comes up in the context of being widely recognized as one of the best outdoor grills on the market but barely showing up in floor conversations. The council split on distribution vs. pricing as the root cause. Anthony's position: pricing never entered his Kalamazoo conversations because when you truly understand the product, price becomes a proof point. He endorses the selective dealer philosophy — find worthy partners and invest deeply. But the council result makes him think twice: true luxury players across North America who have never been approached to carry the line. The model is right. The reach may need to expand.
The dishwasher question excludes Bosch and Miele and asks what's most underappreciated. KitchenAid and ASKO. KitchenAid has been getting better quietly — rack geometry, reliability, fan drying, and price points that fill genuine gaps. It should be competing directly in Bosch conversations and it isn't. ASKO is the secret club brand — if you know it, you love it. Sub-Zero Wolf's matching dishwasher for years, for good reason. The honest limitation is service and parts, and once that aligns, there's nothing stopping it.
The Smeg question is the most forward-looking. This isn't the retro Smeg with the colorful countertop appliances. It's a full professional kitchen suite — ranges, cooktops, refrigeration, dishwashers, hoods, built-in coffee — walking directly into Bertazzoni and Folgore territory. The biggest competitive threat, Anthony argues, isn't either of those brands. It's Fisher & Paykel, which has spent years building relationships with architects, kitchen designers, and sales floors. Smeg is a design brand entering a market where the design community already has those relationships in place. That's a positioning problem — and it's the harder one to solve.
New episodes Monday through Friday. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.
🔗 Referenced this episode:→ Monogram repositioning episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-nsimf-1af9d49→ SCRC July 17th (stagnant brands): https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-uh3pz-1b11fc9

Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford take apart the most marketed feature in the dishwasher category — the auto cycle — starting with the question that Anthony says took him embarrassingly long to ask himself: if the auto cycle handles everything, why does the dishwasher have eight or nine other cycles? The answer is what drives the whole episode.
The turbidity sensor is a light beam and a receiver. Particles in the water scatter the beam — less light through means dirty water, and the machine extends the cycle, raises temperature, and recirculates more aggressively. As the water clears, the sensor calls the load clean and advances. One variable. That's all it has. And here's the list of what that one variable can't tell the machine: dissolved grease, which emulsifies at wash temperatures into droplets too small to scatter light — the water looks clean but carries fat that ends up back on the dishes. Protein film from dairy and starch, which bonds to dish surfaces rather than floating in the water — a heavily protein-soiled load can register as lightly soiled. Odor compounds, which dissolve at concentrations too low to trigger the light beam — that's why the wine glass still smells like wine after a full cycle. Mineral deposits, which accumulate across hundreds of cycles while the sensor can only read what's in the water right now. And detergent residue, which builds during the rinse phase, after the sensor has already made every decision it's going to make.
Every other cycle on the dishwasher panel is the manufacturer publicly acknowledging this. The heavy cycle ignores the sensor entirely and runs a full program — because baked-on soils need sustained high heat regardless of what the water looks like. Delicate and crystal cycles exist for loads the sensor would never justify running correctly. Sanitize runs a guaranteed temperature profile because the sensor can't verify biological kill. Quick cycle exists because the customer knows more about the load than any sensor does. A machine built around a full cycle selection isn't more complicated — it's more honest.
Miele removes the sensor's authority over detergent dispensing with auto dosing. Bosch adds multiple sensing inputs with Precision Wash. Anthony closes with two questions that should open every dishwasher sale: what does a typical load look like for your household, and do you run the dishwasher right after meals or do dishes sit? Those two answers tell you everything about whether auto alone will work for this customer — or whether you needed a heavier conversation before they walked out the door.
New episodes every day. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.