by Serguey Shinder
For most of my time in this trade, a dripping mixer tap was a sale. A plumber came to the counter, bought a new tap, fitted it and threw the old one away. Inside the old one, nearly always, the only thing that had failed was the ceramic cartridge, a small part that controls the flow and costs a fraction of the tap. We rarely stocked them. Many manufacturers did not sell them to merchants at all, and those who did changed them between models without much warning.
In 2025 that began to change at our branches in the North West. A housing association with about nine thousand homes rewrote its contracts for maintenance so that repairs came before replacements, and its contractors were asked to justify any tap, valve or shower they replaced instead of repairing. Within months the same plumbers who had bought whole taps were at our counters asking for cartridges, washers, diverters and seals for specific models, often from a photograph on their phone. We could supply about one request in five.
I expect much more of this over the next ten years. The cost of materials is part of it, and so are customers who want to keep what they have. Rules are moving too. Britain has required makers of some household appliances to keep spare parts available for years since 2021, and the European Union has passed a directive that pushes manufacturers towards repair. Plumbing is not covered in the same way yet, but the expectation is spreading faster than the law, and housing associations and landlords are already acting on it.
For a merchant, that is an awkward shift. Our catalogue describes finished products. It knows that a tap is a tap. It does not know which cartridge sits inside it, whether that cartridge fits three other models, or how long the manufacturer will keep making it. Spare parts are slow sellers in hundreds of variations, exactly the kind of stock our systems are built to avoid.
We have started where we can. Our catalogue now records the main spare parts for each tap and valve we sell, with what they fit, taken from manufacturers' parts lists. When we choose suppliers for our own brand range, we ask how long parts will be available, and we prefer the ones who will commit. The three branches nearest that housing association hold a range of the most common cartridges and seals, and anything else comes from our distribution centre the next day. Counter staff can search by photograph of the old part, which settled more arguments in the first month than anything else we did.
We still sell plenty of taps. More and more of our future, though, will come from helping people keep the ones they already have.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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