Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
To mark the 50th anniversary of housewares chain Lakeland, a report in the Daily Mail on May 24 took a look at some of its best-loved products.
Founded in the early 1960s, the business started by selling plastic bags for home freezing. It now offers 4,000 housewares products across 68 stores nationwide and online.
The list of Lakeland’s best-loved products comprises: an orange peeler; sleeve protectors; Remoska compact electric cooker; gravy skimmer; electric clothes airer; Bobble buster to remove fluff and bobbles from sweaters; silver gloves impregnated with polish, for rubbing tarnished silverware; banana bag (for keeping bananas in the fridge to stop them ripening too quickly); tea tool for squeezing water and flavour out of the tea bag over your cup; sock mates (plastic clips that keep your socks in pairs, even in the washing machine and tumble drier); microwave-lidded saucepan; bean slicer; pineapple corer; PoachPods; Zoku Quick Pop Maker; Chilsner (a plastic ‘icicle’ kept in the freezer and plunged into a drinks bottle); Funky trundle (a pull-along lidded box on rubber wheels); Dryerballs; chocolate pot, for melting chocolate in the microwave; duo colour icing bag; thermospatula: a spatula with a thermometer in the handle; Smoking gun, which infuses food with a smokey flavour; yoghurt maker; avocado 3-in-1 tool; Lekue bread maker; MagiPull can opener; strawberry huller; cake pop maker; Magic balls: tiny silver balls that clean glassware when swished around with soapy water); sous vide; Yolk hero (for separating egg yolks, leaving the white behind); blind cleaner; laundry eco-egg; banana tree; cleaning sticks; Glove buddy; track cleaner; deco spoons, for decorating desserts with swirls of sauce; fat trappers; drain weasel, which extracts tangled hair from plugholes; spider catcher; stainless steel ‘soap’; Lammacs (one of Lakeland’s first products, these macintoshes were sold at agricultural shows in the 1960s to protect lambs during Cumbrian winters); steam mop; roast-in bags; potato ricer; apple master – a gadget for peeling and coring apples: the user fixes the fruit on the prongs, clamps it in place and turns the handle; nesting pans and PushPan.
The final entry is a pastry press set. The report said that Lakeland keeps discontinuing this product but customers, who have loved it for making Cornish pasties for three decades, keep asking for its return. ‘It’s not available at the moment so you’ll have to nag them to bring it back yet again,’ the report concluded.
