You’ve seen the pictures in home-decorating magazines “” designer kitchens with gleaming stainless-steel appliances that look more like modern art than cooking tools.
Odds are your kitchen is a little bit different.
Your kitchen probably has dinner thawing on one counter, piles of bills on another and a refrigerator covered with magnets that serves as a family bulletin board/art gallery.
GE Consumer Products today will launch a Louisville-made line of refrigerators targeted at customers who want the high-end look of stainless steel without paying stainless-steel prices.
Called CleanSteel, the new GE line uses a thin layer of stainless-steel look-a-like material laminated onto a traditional steel refrigerator. The refrigerators are several hundred dollars cheaper than stainless steel, but don’t pick up fingerprints and will hold magnets.
The line could make Appliance Park more profitable. The refrigerators built in Building 5 now generally target the lowest end of the appliance market, but the faux stainless refrigerators are priced between the low-end and true stainless-steel products.
“The typical top-freezer refrigerator from Appliance Park sells anywhere from $399 to $599,” said Jerry Rose, product general manager for refrigeration at GE. “This product, because of the technology that’s been added to it, will sell for $649,” he said, referring to the 18-cubic-foot model. The 25-cubic-foot side-by-side model sells for about $900.
Those prices put the CleanSteel products at about half of what GE charges for its higher-end Profile line of true stainless-steel refrigerators, which have more features. Similarly equipped stainless-steel models from Whirlpool and Frigidaire cost about $200 more than CleanSteel models.
The addition is part of GE’s strategy to make higher-profit products at Appliance Park. The facility, with its 3,000 production workers and 3,000 engineers and office workers, has struggled to make money in a market where few appliances are built in the United States.
That high-margin strategy was also behind moving production of dishwashers and washing machines that use stainless-steel drums to Appliance Park.
None of these appliances will reverse losses at the plant overnight, but Rose said if CleanSteel is a success, it could increase output at Appliance Park by 5 percent to 10 percent by the end of next year.
“This is a price point that today we’re not competing in out of Building 5.”
In its marketing materials for CleanSteel, GE promotes the refrigerators’ ability to hold magnets and resist fingerprints, but the likely selling point will be price.
Danny Lyons, president of Chenoweth Appliances, said he has sold nine side-by-side CleanSteel refrigerators in the past month. In all cases, customers came in wanting stainless steel but chose the GE product when they saw the price.
“They’re already looking for stainless, and then they see this,” Lyons said. “It looks like stainless and it can save them some dollars.”
The stainless look has been extremely popular in home appliances for about four years, said Paul Leuthe, a spokesman for high-end refrigerator producer Sub-Zero, of Madison, Wis.
“There are some inherent weaknesses in stainless steel, but that hasn’t hurt sales at all. Fingerprints and magnets are logical and obvious complaints, but we’re still seeing huge demand for stainless.”
Leuthe said his company has looked into alternatives to stainless steel and finishes that do not pick up fingerprints, but there is little urgency to those efforts with customers demanding traditional stainless products.
While CleanSteel may look like stainless steel, it has a different feel and texture. It generally feels to be about room temperature while true stainless steel is cold to the touch.
No customers have specifically said they wanted refrigerators that hold magnets, Lyons said.
In fact, part of the aesthetic appeal of stainless-steel appliances is the clean, uncluttered look they give homes, something that was not lost on Rose. He said he expects families to cover their faux-stainless refrigerators with magnets and finger paintings just as they do with painted appliances. But those families will be able to clear them off when they entertain.
“It could be the best of both worlds,” Rose said
>From courier-journal.com