K-BAN Hardware recently launched its new store in Village Plaza on Constant Spring Road in St Andrew, and it’s allowing e-commerce to meet storefront.

“This space is really what we call click and mortar, so it’s a showroom that’s meant to bridge the gap between the digital and the physical,” CEO Tej Banhan told the Jamaica Observer during the launch.

According to Banhan, digital is very important to the K-Ban team, and it has been integrated from the back end of the business all the way to the forward-facing area. The company’s desire was to create more efficiency for its consumers. The Village Plaza showroom is now the fifth location for the hardware and the first in the Corporate Area that will allow customers to look and feel the products on display, to understand the quality they are interested in purchasing. They will also be guided by sales representatives to the website to browse more products online.

“We have a very wide selection of products, and it’s very hard to showcase them all in one space, so we go based on demand,” Banhan explained to the Business Observer.

“We took this concept by observing a lot of the successful companies in the US, some of them started as native digital brands that then implemented it into physical stores and the opposite where some of them were traditionally brick and mortar and then went into e-commerce and then bridged the gap through smaller pop-up stores as well,” he added.

The platform was initially launched in 2021 and, since then, it has seen continuous improvement and an increase in the volume of traffic and transactions.

The company opened the Village Plaza location in partnership with a few of its product manufacturers, including Roca Incepa, a supplier of premium finishes originally based in Spain, and is among the largest manufacturers of ceramic coatings in the world.

Banhan revealed that the partnerships were forged at tile shows.

“We had a meeting and we realise our values are very well-aligned in terms of how we want to treat our clients, what type of value we want the customers to have, especially when it comes to price, because we are very aware of what prices are in the market, and we are actually coming in more competitive than any product that can come close to the same,” he said.

The Roca Incepa brand features unique textures and tones that come from wall tiles that are traditionally not available in Jamaica. Banhan revealed that new products are on the way to the market, including an art line consisting of tiles with pops of colours and a sanitary wear line from Roca Incepa.

“We will carry that brand and we will introduce it to Jamaica, and we think it will be very well-received. We started to already bring a sister brand to it that’s called Celeste, so those toilets have been performing very well, customers love it, it creates a different finish, [and] it’s at that price point that people can really afford,” he boasted.

The new showroom was renovated with products from K-Ban, from lighting to flooring. Banhan said that about 98 per cent of the products on display, including functional pieces in the showroom, are from K-Ban and all are in stock.

The other locations are two in Westmoreland, two in Linstead, St Catherine, and a full e-commerce platform.

“We will continue to open up stores across the island because we see where there is customer demand, and as long as there is a customer need that is not being met we will always seek to fill that gap,” said Banhan.