Julie Burns, Executive Director of Monogram, on What's Actually Driving the Brand's Rise

Julie Burns, Executive Director of Monogram, on What's Actually Driving the Brand's Rise

The Power Index has been tracking a shift — Monogram is showing up in showroom conversations in places it historically hasn't. In this episode, we sit down with Julie Burns, Executive Director of Monogram, to hear what's driving it straight from the source. Julie came into the appliance industry from a luxury background outside of appliances, which gave her a perspective that long-time industry insiders often don't have. She walks through what she's built over the past six-plus years at Monogram, what's resonating with the design and trade community that's increasingly specifying the brand, and what the path forward looks like as new lines come to market. For the salespeople listening: this episode gets directly into how to position Monogram in a showroom full of luxury brands, how to separate it from the GE/Café/Profile family in the customer's mind, and how to anchor it in a single, clear statement when a luxury buyer is standing in front of you. Jon also gets into the support structure — Monogram has its own dedicated sales team and service operation separate from other GE brands, which matters enormously on high-end projects where post-sale friction can cost you a relationship. Learn more at monogram.com 🎙️ Hosted by Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Bigger Kitchen Doesn't Mean Better Kitchen — And Nobody In the Room Will Tell You That

The bigger the kitchen, the better. That's the assumption. Jon Beresford disagrees — and he has a very specific reason why. In this episode, Jon and Shannon break down why massive luxury kitchens are often the most poorly designed spaces in any home, and why almost nobody involved in building them has any financial reason to tell the homeowner to pump the brakes. The case starts with constraint. Smaller kitchens force trade-offs. Trade-offs force clarity. Clarity is what separates a kitchen that functions brilliantly from one that just looks expensive in the photograph. Big kitchens remove all of that pressure — and what fills the void is accumulation. More appliances, more zones, more everything, designed around an imagined version of how the family plans to live rather than how they actually do. Jon walks through what that looks like in practice: oversize ranges, refrigeration walls for couples who barely stock milk, secondary dishwashers that run a few times a year, steam ovens nobody learned to use, warming drawers storing cookie sheets. None of those products are the problem. The problem is that nobody in the design chain — not the designer, not the builder, not the salesperson — is rewarded for saying "do you actually need this?" The only person who pays that long-term cost is the homeowner. And they're almost always the least informed person in the room during the design phase. Jon also gets into the trap salespeople fall into on large projects — the moment they accept the customer's pre-built vision and become a coordinator instead of an advisor — and what the best salespeople do instead. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Retail Council Ep. 2: Steam Ovens, Performance vs. Ownership & The Brand Winning Right Now

The Steel Cod Retail Council is back for its second weekly episode. Four questions, answered anonymously by a handpicked group of experienced independent appliance retail voices — owners, managers, floor salespeople who deal with these conversations every day. This week's questions: Q1: Miele, Wolf or Gaggenau — you can only carry one steam oven line. Which do you take? Jon walks through what the council landed on and what the results reveal about how steam ovens are currently being positioned in the channel. Q2: Performance or ownership experience — what do customers gravitate toward more today? The council split three ways, but Jon argues all three camps are actually describing the same thing from different vantage points. Performance opens the conversation. Ownership experience closes the relationship. The salespeople winning right now are carrying both. Q3: What category are salespeople still massively underselling because they don't understand the value story? Steam ovens dominated the responses — described as being presented as a reheating tool rather than a kitchen hub, with salesperson knowledge cited as the core problem. Not customer resistance. Not price. Salesperson knowledge. Ventilation came up strong as a second answer. Front load laundry, speed ovens, warming drawers, and under-counter beverage centers all surfaced as categories being left behind by a cautious sales mindset. Q4: Which brand has the strongest combination of product positioning and timing right now? The most diverse set of answers the council has given yet — GE, Miele, Sub-Zero/Wolf/Cove, LG, Fisher & Paykel all receiving mentions with very different reasoning behind each one. No consensus. Jon explains why that actually tells you something important about how competitive the market is right now. 📚 Steel Cod University — free for Steel Cod users: https://university.steelcod.com/ 👉 Performance vs. Ownership Experience episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-6adhj-1af035d 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Deep Fill vs. Load Sensing: The Laundry Debate That Refuses to Die

This is probably the most emotionally charged debate in the appliance industry. More emotional than gas vs. induction. More emotional than front load vs. top load. And in 2026, it's still very much alive. Deep fill vs. load sensing — and what it actually tells us about how human beings process trust, visual evidence, and decades of marketing conditioning. Jon Beresford breaks down where the belief that "more water equals better cleaning" actually comes from, why the appliance industry created it, and why they never bothered to update the story as the engineering evolved. He explains what load sensing is actually doing — not minimizing water, but calibrating it to the specific load — and why that distinction matters more than most people realize. He walks through the detergent concentration argument, the optimal threshold problem, and why the existence of a deep fill button doesn't prove load sensing has failed (hint: no one adds a special button for the objectively best option in every situation). Speed Queen comes up — because of course it does. Jon addresses it directly: the brand earns every bit of its reputation, but he asks the harder question of how much of what customers love is actually attributable to the water, versus everything else Speed Queen builds into the machine. The final take: deep fill solves a human problem. Load sensing solves an engineering problem. They're not competing. The debate has survived this long because everyone's been using the wrong scoreboard. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

NSF Certification: The Selling Point Most Salespeople Aren't Using

NSF certification comes up on appliance floors more than most salespeople realize — and most of them can't fully explain what it means when it does. In this episode, Shannon and Jon break it down from scratch. What NSF certification is actually measuring, why a dishwasher with a "sanitize" button isn't automatically NSF certified, and what the difference between the two actually means for the customer who's relying on it. The conversation goes beyond dishwashers — Jon covers other appliance categories where NSF certification matters and how the selling conversation shifts depending on the product. He also draws the distinction between NSF certification and an allergen cycle, walks through who this conversation is most valuable for (parents, healthcare workers, households with specific health needs), and explains how salespeople tend to lose the customer at this exact moment — and how to avoid it. Is it relevant to every customer? Jon gives an honest answer. If you've used NSF certification as a selling point on the floor — or if you've struggled with how to bring it up — leave a comment and Jon will reply. Or email Anthony directly. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.