The Steel CodCast

The bigger the kitchen, the better. That's the assumption. Jon Beresford disagrees — and he has a very specific reason why.
In this episode, Jon and Shannon break down why massive luxury kitchens are often the most poorly designed spaces in any home, and why almost nobody involved in building them has any financial reason to tell the homeowner to pump the brakes.
The case starts with constraint. Smaller kitchens force trade-offs. Trade-offs force clarity. Clarity is what separates a kitchen that functions brilliantly from one that just looks expensive in the photograph. Big kitchens remove all of that pressure — and what fills the void is accumulation. More appliances, more zones, more everything, designed around an imagined version of how the family plans to live rather than how they actually do.
Jon walks through what that looks like in practice: oversize ranges, refrigeration walls for couples who barely stock milk, secondary dishwashers that run a few times a year, steam ovens nobody learned to use, warming drawers storing cookie sheets. None of those products are the problem. The problem is that nobody in the design chain — not the designer, not the builder, not the salesperson — is rewarded for saying "do you actually need this?"
The only person who pays that long-term cost is the homeowner. And they're almost always the least informed person in the room during the design phase.
Jon also gets into the trap salespeople fall into on large projects — the moment they accept the customer's pre-built vision and become a coordinator instead of an advisor — and what the best salespeople do instead.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The Steel Cod Retail Council is back for its second weekly episode. Four questions, answered anonymously by a handpicked group of experienced independent appliance retail voices — owners, managers, floor salespeople who deal with these conversations every day.
This week's questions:
Q1: Miele, Wolf or Gaggenau — you can only carry one steam oven line. Which do you take?Jon walks through what the council landed on and what the results reveal about how steam ovens are currently being positioned in the channel.
Q2: Performance or ownership experience — what do customers gravitate toward more today?The council split three ways, but Jon argues all three camps are actually describing the same thing from different vantage points. Performance opens the conversation. Ownership experience closes the relationship. The salespeople winning right now are carrying both.
Q3: What category are salespeople still massively underselling because they don't understand the value story?Steam ovens dominated the responses — described as being presented as a reheating tool rather than a kitchen hub, with salesperson knowledge cited as the core problem. Not customer resistance. Not price. Salesperson knowledge. Ventilation came up strong as a second answer. Front load laundry, speed ovens, warming drawers, and under-counter beverage centers all surfaced as categories being left behind by a cautious sales mindset.
Q4: Which brand has the strongest combination of product positioning and timing right now?The most diverse set of answers the council has given yet — GE, Miele, Sub-Zero/Wolf/Cove, LG, Fisher & Paykel all receiving mentions with very different reasoning behind each one. No consensus. Jon explains why that actually tells you something important about how competitive the market is right now.
📚 Steel Cod University — free for Steel Cod users: https://university.steelcod.com/👉 Performance vs. Ownership Experience episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-6adhj-1af035d
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

This is probably the most emotionally charged debate in the appliance industry. More emotional than gas vs. induction. More emotional than front load vs. top load. And in 2026, it's still very much alive.
Deep fill vs. load sensing — and what it actually tells us about how human beings process trust, visual evidence, and decades of marketing conditioning.
Jon Beresford breaks down where the belief that "more water equals better cleaning" actually comes from, why the appliance industry created it, and why they never bothered to update the story as the engineering evolved. He explains what load sensing is actually doing — not minimizing water, but calibrating it to the specific load — and why that distinction matters more than most people realize.
He walks through the detergent concentration argument, the optimal threshold problem, and why the existence of a deep fill button doesn't prove load sensing has failed (hint: no one adds a special button for the objectively best option in every situation).
Speed Queen comes up — because of course it does. Jon addresses it directly: the brand earns every bit of its reputation, but he asks the harder question of how much of what customers love is actually attributable to the water, versus everything else Speed Queen builds into the machine.
The final take: deep fill solves a human problem. Load sensing solves an engineering problem. They're not competing. The debate has survived this long because everyone's been using the wrong scoreboard.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

NSF certification comes up on appliance floors more than most salespeople realize — and most of them can't fully explain what it means when it does.
In this episode, Shannon and Jon break it down from scratch. What NSF certification is actually measuring, why a dishwasher with a "sanitize" button isn't automatically NSF certified, and what the difference between the two actually means for the customer who's relying on it.
The conversation goes beyond dishwashers — Jon covers other appliance categories where NSF certification matters and how the selling conversation shifts depending on the product. He also draws the distinction between NSF certification and an allergen cycle, walks through who this conversation is most valuable for (parents, healthcare workers, households with specific health needs), and explains how salespeople tend to lose the customer at this exact moment — and how to avoid it.
Is it relevant to every customer? Jon gives an honest answer.
If you've used NSF certification as a selling point on the floor — or if you've struggled with how to bring it up — leave a comment and Jon will reply. Or email Anthony directly.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

We've been collecting questions from retail partners for months and today we're finally answering them. Ten questions, from the floor — real, anonymous, and in some cases pretty uncomfortable.
This is the first Steel Cod mailbag episode. Every question comes from someone in the independent appliance channel who took the time to submit something they couldn't always ask out loud. Jon Beresford answers all ten, and Shannon keeps him honest.
The questions cover: where Jon's industry knowledge actually comes from, the honest truth about why induction is still losing on the floor, which brand Jon thinks is the most underrated right now, whether Steel Cod would ever take equity from a manufacturer in exchange for promotion (and why the answer is a hard no), what to do when a rep tells you your entry-level and premium models are basically the same thing, whether showrooms can carry too many brands, how to handle a competitor price match the right way, what to do about a top salesperson who gives customers inaccurate information, the one type of customer Jon used to dread — and what that customer ended up teaching him, and the three traits Jon believes every great salesperson has to have innately.
References to past episodes:👉 Gas vs. Induction full episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-nnr3e-1abb7cd👉 Chef Rachelle Boucher episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-4uw9q-1ae807a👉 SKS vs. Thermador episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-fdptj-1aee998👉 The Customer Who Knows More episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-ykt2c-1af002f
📩 Have a question for the mailbag? Email Anthony.🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Reliability vs. serviceability — most people think they're the same thing. They're not. And the difference might be the most underresearched part of buying an appliance.
In this episode, Jon Beresford breaks down a distinction the industry has been blurring for years: reliability is the probability of a problem occurring. Serviceability is what happens when it does. Consumers devote almost all of their research time to the first one — and almost none to the second. That's a major blind spot.
Jon walks through why the definition of reliability has quietly shifted from "less likely to fail" to "should never fail" — and why that's a standard no appliance on earth can actually meet. Then he makes the case that the more important question isn't "will it break?" It's "what happens when it does?"
He puts two refrigerators side by side — one with a 2% service rate, one with 8% — and then finishes the story with real-world serviceability outcomes that flip the obvious answer on its head. We also get into why the internet makes this problem worse (it's built almost entirely around failure stories, rarely the recovery), and why loyalty is almost never created when everything goes right — it's created when something goes wrong and the company handles it exceptionally well.
For retailers: Jon explains why servicing what you sell is one of the most powerful sales tools you have, and why retailers who can't speak confidently about their service process end up defaulting to reliability numbers because they have nothing else to offer.
Reliability isn't overrated. It's just incomplete.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford of Steel Cod.🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The garbage disposal is one of the most used fixtures in any kitchen — and it hasn't meaningfully changed since 1953. Nobody in the industry pushed for better, and consumers never thought to ask. They just accepted the noise, the smell, the slow drains, and the mystery jams as part of the deal.
In this episode, we sit down with Tim Ketchum to talk about Composer — a completely rethought garbage disposal designed by aerospace engineers who looked at what the category had normalized and decided none of it was acceptable.
Jon Beresford and Tim walk through everything that's broken about the standard disposal: the 70dB+ noise level (Composer runs below 50dB), the inadequate grinding that's been quietly damaging residential plumbing for decades, and the complete lack of innovation that the industry wrote off as "good enough." Then Tim walks through what Composer actually built instead — a 1 HP motor (double the industry average), an Iris system that keeps grinding contained, a continuous bio enzyme that breaks down food before buildup starts, an automatic water flush, and LED lighting under the sink.
Jon also talks about what this means for independent retailers right now. Composer is about to start shipping. The customer hasn't heard of it yet. The competition hasn't caught up. That window — when a product is new enough that the story is still yours to tell — is wide open. The retailers who show up first and tell it right are the ones who own that category long-term.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford of Steel Cod, with guest Tim Ketchum.🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The customer walks in having watched every YouTube video, read every Reddit thread, and practically memorized the spec sheet. Most salespeople either try to out-knowledge them or shut down entirely. Both are mistakes — and in this episode, Jon Beresford explains exactly what's really going on when that customer walks through your door.
Spoiler: they're not there to embarrass you. They're anxious. And they're still in your showroom for a reason.
Jon breaks down the psychology behind the heavily researched customer — why all that preparation is actually a sign of emotional investment, not a threat — and what the best salespeople do differently in that moment.
We get into the two most common ways salespeople blow this interaction (the ego battle and the passive retreat), why both come from the same core insecurity, and what to do instead. Jon walks through the single question that consistently unlocks the prepared customer's real friction point and why asking it shifts the entire dynamic of the conversation.
We also dig into how the value of physical retail has fundamentally changed. The internet gives customers information. Your showroom gives them context — and that context (hundreds of real deliveries, installs, service experiences) is something no algorithm or Reddit thread can replicate.
The prepared customer has usually already sold themselves on the product. What they haven't done is sell themselves on the decision. And that gap? That's where your value lives.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford of Steel Cod.🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The Steel Cod Retail Council makes its podcast debut — and we're kicking it off with four questions that cut straight to what independent appliance retailers actually think.
Every week, Jon Beresford (VP of Sales, Steel Cod) surveys a handpicked group of the most experienced independent appliance retail voices in the country. Owners, managers, floor salespeople — people who've been in the trenches for decades. They answer anonymously, which is exactly why what comes back is so honest.
This week's four questions:
1. Bosch vs. Miele vs. Cove — if one became your entire dishwasher business, which do you take?The council chose Bosch, but Jon reveals the more important story underneath: Miele isn't losing to Bosch, it's losing to retailer default. And the Cove result exposes a gap between brand pedigree and earned trust that no Sub-Zero/Wolf halo can close on its own.
2. Gas or Induction — what are customers actually gravitating toward and why?Gas won. But the real question is why induction keeps losing when the rational case for it has already been made and won. Jon explains why specs can't close that sale and what actually converts a gas customer. We also reference our conversation with Chef Rachelle Boucher and her hands-on approach to induction education.👉 Chef Rachelle Boucher episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-4uw9q-1ae807a
3. What's the biggest obstacle for selling luxury appliances to younger buyers?The council split almost evenly — half blamed the buyer, half blamed the salesperson. Jon argues one side is right and one is leaving serious long-term revenue on the table. This also connects to a recent episode about the difference between giving customers information versus giving them understanding.👉 Related episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-4vwgw-1ae3d30
4. Which luxury brand still doesn't have a convincing dishwasher story?Viking topped the list. Monogram followed. The pattern Jon draws across all the responses reveals something the whole industry should be paying attention to.
Shannon O'Hara (Head of Marketing, Steel Cod) co-hosts while Anthony is traveling. New format, real results, real talk — let us know what you think.
📩 Want to submit a question for the Retail Council? Email Anthony.🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

A customer walks in and says they're looking at Thermador. Most salespeople immediately pivot to a challenger brand. That's the mistake — and it's costing the sale every single time.
In this episode, Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford break down the real reason challenger brands like SKS, Fisher & Paykel, and Blue Star keep getting undersold in the luxury space. It's not a product problem. It's a sequencing problem.
Customers spending $40,000 to $80,000 on appliances aren't looking for excitement — they're looking for confidence. Established brands already come with that. Challenger brands have to earn it one win at a time. And the salespeople who understand that difference are the ones who consistently get these brands into kitchens.
What you'll hear in this episode:
Why customers evaluate risk, not products — and what that means for how you open the conversation
The single fastest way to kill your credibility when a customer mentions Thermador
Why leading with manufacturer excitement, innovation, and brand story almost always backfires
The "find your first win" approach that builds challenger brand trust without forcing it
Why trust develops through relevance and proof — not pressure or persuasion
New episode every day of the week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and if you're getting value from the show, a rating goes a long way.