BHETA chaired a consultative retailer and supplier workshop on knife retailing on May 15, attended by top retail and supplier brands. The workshop was BHETA’s opening move in its responsible knife retailing campaign, a proactive initiative agreed with members following an initial consultation on March 25.
Retailers representative of all styles of kitchen selling from premium to mass market to discounter attended the workshop including independents, department stores and supermarkets. Retail brands such as John Lewis, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Dunelm, Steamer Trading, T K Maxx, Elys of Wimbledon and Harts of Stur joined BIRA, BHETA and leading knife suppliers, Taylor’s Eye Witness, Amefa, Fiskars, Meyer, Haus, Burton McCall, Kuhn Rikon and Robert Welch.
BHETA’s Chief Executive Andrew Weiss opened the meeting which was thereafter chaired by Chief Operating Officer Will Jones. The agenda covered all supplier and retailer aspects of the issue including product design, packaging and merchandising, point of sale and checkout procedure, consumer education and political lobbying.
Commenting on the workshop event, Will Jones said, “BHETA’s initial action after the March 25th supplier meeting was to write to all major retailers to ask for their input and engagement in support of best practice on this serious and complex issue. It is excellent that we received such commitment from so many leading retailers. The level of debate, positive feedback and consensus on collaborative supplier/retailer action was heartening and exciting. As a result, BHETA will be able to announce the first actions in the responsible retailing campaign within weeks.”
Andrew Weiss added, “Supplier and retailer collaboration ensuring not only proactive but consistent, level playing field action on the important and complicated issue of knife crime is crucial. Individual supplier or retailer action in isolation will not be effective, but we believe we now have the principles agreed to make an industry-wide difference.”
For more information about BHETA and BHETA lobbying, contact the Member Services Team on 0121 237 1130.
Source: BHETA, May 2019