Kitchen Warehouse named 2025 Campaign Brief WA Advertiser of the Year at gala Oasis Ball

Born in WA back in 1994, Kitchen Warehouse remains a WA-headquartered and family-owned business. The company has 26 stores nationwide along with a booming online business. Their focus is on East Coast expansion, with 5 new stores opening this year and a plan to get to 40 stores by the end of 2027. Over the last 12 months, they have delivered an impressive body of creative work and business results that sees them a worthy winner of Campaign Brief’s Advertiser of the Year award. Finalists for this prestigious client award were WA Police Union, WA Police and Department of Fire & Emergency.

The past few years have seen significant changes in Kitchen Warehouse’s business. They’ve gone from being product-led to becoming customer-led. Putting customers at the center of their decision making, re-segmenting their base, investing in building their brand and moving away from solely showcasing product and price.

Kitchen Warehouse is now working hard to connect with their audience on a more emotional level. They’ve also been busy weaning themselves off the performance marketing drug and focusing instead on top of funnel awareness activity. Recently, they’ve enjoyed flexing their creative muscles and finding disruptive ways to get the brand noticed.

While other brands may have created one standout piece of work, Kitchen Warehouse has delivered creative excellence across several projects.

By partnering with the likes of Berlin, Block Branding, Social Meteor, and Special Group (alongside their newly created in-house studio), they’ve produced work that Australia’s biggest brands would be proud of – but they’ve done it on about 1/100th of the budget at their disposal.

The formula is simple: Kitchen Warehouse is a passionate believer in the power of creativity.

They understand that standing out, getting noticed and being talked about is the best way to build awareness. And that when they do that, their modest media investment can go much further.

Campaign highlights include:

Black Friday
A bold outdoor campaign designed to cut through the clutter of hyper-competitive Black Friday messaging. They turned standard billboards into eye-catching product and price demonstrations, playing with the medium and breaking its confines. The campaign received global acclaim and drove record sales on Black Friday. Sales for the Black Friday period were up 31.9% YOY.

The campaign was also recognised at the inaugural OMA Creative Awards, winning two Best Of Category awards.

High Fryer
A campaign to raise awareness of the 7000 pots and pans hitting Australian landfills daily. High Fryer was both a physical and digital sculpture representing a previously unknown problem, and promoting our ‘Great Pan Exchange’ program as the solution. The launch event, cinema ads, and paid digital campaign encouraged people to bring their old pans to our stores where we recycle them responsibly. Anyone depositing an old pan also receives a discount on a new one. Since launch, over 5 tonnes of old cookware has been collected.

Wolstead
Over the last 12 months, Kitchen Warehouse has done a significant amount of work rebranding their biggest in-house brand, Wolstead. They created the platform ‘For those who know’, calling out Wolstead’s excellent quality credentials, but unknown status.

A new identity system, new packaging, new displays and a suite of new content. Sales of Wolstead have increased by over 50% in the last 6 months.

Keep Mum out of the Kitchen Day
Rather than settling for the usual Mother’s Day tropes, Kitchen Warehouse decided to tell their most loyal customers to get out of the kitchen. Renaming Mother’s Day to ‘Keep Mum Out of the Kitchen Day,’ they rallied kids and their families to step up to the plate giving them product tips and recipe inspiration. They even ran a competition to win ‘Kev’, the Kitchen Warehouse security guard to make sure Mum stayed away. Mother’s Day period sales increased +14% YOY, and store traffic +7.5% YOY

Side by Side
Building on the Wolstead rebrand, Kitchen Warehouse wanted to prove that Wolstead is just as good as more expensive professional grade cookware. So they launched a content series called ‘Side by Side’.

The series sees professional chefs cooking their signature dish twice, once with their preferred cookware brand and once with Wolstead. The first episode features Cameron Cansdell stress testing Wolstead Ultra and is currently running on Meta, YouTube, paid social and cinema.

The business results for Kitchen Warehouse are outstanding following this incredible year for the WA-born company:
Profits are up over 45% YoY.
IHB Sales growth +50% YoY.
Online sales growth +11% YoY.
Foot traffic +12% YoY (excluding new stores).