Five days in Bologna. Four hundred and thirty conversations with designers, architects, distributors, and procurement managers. One consistent theme that ran through almost every serious conversation: lead time reliability matters more than price.
Cersaie is the world's largest ceramics and bathroom exhibition. It runs every September in Bologna — thirty-two halls across the BolognaFiere fairground, around nine hundred exhibitors, and approximately one hundred thousand visitors over five days. We have exhibited there since 2018. This was the year we stopped trying to impress people and started trying to listen.
What We Showed
Our stand this year was built around three themes: the S-MLB smart toilet (which had its European debut at Cersaie), the expanded vanity programme, and the PVD finish range laid out as a physical sample wall — eighteen finish tiles at 300 mm × 200 mm, mounted in a configuration that allowed visitors to hold them against their own tile and material samples.
The finish wall was the best investment we made. It generated more substantive conversations than the product displays. When a designer can hold a brushed brass PVD tile against their own stone sample in real light, the conversation about specification becomes real. When they are looking at a photograph on a screen, it does not.
The Smart Toilet
The S-MLB generated the most attention. It also generated the most scepticism from experienced bathroom specifiers, which is the correct response. Smart toilets have a poor reputation in the European specification market because the first generation of smart toilets required proprietary service contracts, failed in hard-water areas, and had control interfaces that were illegible to anyone over sixty. We spent more time in those conversations explaining what we had solved than what we had built.
What We Learned
The conversation that repeated itself most consistently — across distributors in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Spain — was about lead time reliability rather than lead time length. We had expected price to be the primary concern in the post-inflation market. It was not.
"I can plan around a twelve-week lead time. I cannot plan around a lead time that says eight weeks and delivers at fourteen."
This is feedback we have heard before, but the volume this year was higher, and the examples more specific. Three distributors cited projects where late deliveries had resulted in liquidated damages charges passed to them by their clients. The category is not price-sensitive at the specification level; it is reliability-sensitive.
What We Are Doing With This
From January 2026, we are publishing confirmed lead times — not target lead times — for our principal SKUs on a rolling twelve-week basis. If the confirmed lead time for a product is sixteen weeks, we say sixteen weeks. We will not say eight and hope. The data will be available to our distribution partners through the partner portal.
We are also building a production buffer for our twenty most-specified SKUs — the basin mixers, the thermostatic shower valves, the ceramic disc cartridges in the four most popular finish codes. The buffer target is four weeks of stock at the Xiamen finished-goods warehouse. We reached that target for fifteen of the twenty SKUs in September; the remaining five will follow by the end of January 2026.
We will be at Cersaie again in September 2026. If you are planning to attend and would like to schedule a meeting at the stand, contact our European team now — the diaries for Bologna fill quickly.
