58 years and still going strong

C&C’s founder John Kitchin celebrates 58 years in the industry next year and we thought we would take a look at what has changed in those years:

Take a look at that phone – see the wire kids – tablets, blackberries and smart phones were medicine, fruit and unknown respectively.

There was no direct dial either, the boss had a phone line hard wired to their office with a specially guarded private number. You had to work your way past the receptionist to get in touch with them. And added to this there was no way you could get hold of people who were out of the office without ringing ahead to their next meeting.

And what about the poor receptionist? All but done away with now except for the brightest companies who realise a good one will make the business – so much better than dial 1 for sales, dial 2 for accounts, dial 3………..

Next we think of the computer – there weren’t any. Letters were hand written or typed, telex machines chattered and vast armies of draughtsmen laboured over their drawing boards. Now we have 3D rendered CAD images that allow photo quality mock-ups of almost any kitchen scheme to be viewed and amended, sometimes after the job has started installation.

As for sending those drawings to a client – post or courier were the only options, faxes arrived around the mid to late 80’s (and then the paper was weird and the images disappeared in sunlight). Email wasn’t in wide use until the 90’s. And then there was often only one email address for a whole group of people.

To promote your business you created a nice brochure, went to large well attended trade exhibitions and ran adverts in printed magazines. Nobody went online, there wasn’t one. Birds tweeted and photos took at least one week to print and were often disappointing (and black and white).

Oh and everyone wore a tie.