Kitchen Sofia tested a specific proposition: would enough people in Sofia want a custom kitchen if they could get a price indication early, have fewer meetings and move more quickly towards installation? My assessment as the operator was yes. Our first-month review recorded roughly 20 reported enquiries. The harder question became who could actually build the kitchens.
What makes a simpler buying process worth testing?
SmartKey owns Kitchen Sofia. The idea came from my experience in the kitchen industry. A company can spend considerable time preparing a project, meeting a prospective customer and revising a design before the customer commits. Someone pays for that work even when the initial design is offered for free.
The site gave shoppers price guidance, a calculator and a way to request an on-site measurement. A shopper could decide whether the rough price made sense before starting a longer discussion. The business idea was to reduce unpaid preparation enough to offer a custom kitchen at a price closer to ready-made alternatives than to a premium designer service. That was the pricing hypothesis behind the test.
What did the first month establish?
The review dated 2 July recorded around 20 enquiries in the first month. That figure is approximate. It counts enquiries and does not identify how many came from search, became measurement visits or turned into orders. What mattered to me as the operator was finding enough people who wanted the faster, simpler way of working.
For a business testing a similar offer, I would keep three separate counts from day one: enquiries, booked measurements and accepted orders. I would also record time spent preparing each quote. Those records would tell you whether a simpler process reduces costs as well as attracting interest.
Why the project did not expand further
My existing production and installation contacts were already fully booked. I did not have the time to recruit a dedicated team. Buying more traffic at that point would have increased the pressure on the one part of the business that could not expand. Kitchen Sofia remains open at limited scale.
For SmartKey Agency, the next investment this test points to is fulfilment capacity. If you are using local marketing to test a new offer, decide in advance who will take the first order and who can take the tenth. Our guide to small business SEO services covers the separate question of how customers find you in the first place.