It is a cold October morning in Dalston, East London, but Leo McKee is in his element. Mr McKee, chief executive of BrightHouse, the retailer, loves nothing more than visiting his stores and is preparing to open up shop in testing circumstances. The store manager has been called to Manchester on a family emergency and a regional manager has been drafted in on what is expected to be a busy day.

Mr McKee, an ebullient Scot, is also preparing to pitch in. “I go around the stores every Saturday,” he says. “Normally, I wear a badge. When I and the other senior managers wear the uniform in the stores we are subordinate to the store manager and I like that. A few weeks ago, when I went into a store on a Friday afternoon, all the staff were very busy and I saw two ladies looking in the window. I went over to them and said: ‘Hello ladies, can I help you?’ And one of them replied: ‘You’re late back from your lunch, aren’t you?’ All I could say was: ‘You’re right.’

“I like the fact that colleagues think the guys running the business are approachable. If you look at the very best retailers — Terry Leahy, Philip Green — they are never out of the stores and are always talking to their customers.”

Readers of The Times might not be too familiar with BrightHouse. The company sells furniture, electrical equipment and kitchen appliances to customers on low incomes and supplies the credit enabling them to make the purchases. Nearly half its customers are largely or wholly dependent on benefits and about two fifths are single mothers.

It is owned by Vision Capital, a private equity company, but traces its roots to Crazy George’s — a chain that, in turn, was part of Boxclever, the business formed in the 1999 merger between Granada’s television rentals division and Radio Rentals, the two leading companies in the market.

Mr McKee, a former chief executive of Woolworths and chairman of Courts, arrived at BrightHouse in October 2005 when the business was struggling to recover from the Crazy George’s legacy. It was distrusted by the communities it served and Mr McKee’s first job was to try to turn around that perception. So the group has changed the way it does a number of things, directly as a result of customer feedback: “One thing we have changed is our [credit] collections. A significant number of our customers are on benefits and the Government has changed from a weekly to a fortnightly payment cycle. So we switched to a fortnightly payment cycle.” Other innovations include bigger stocks of black fridges and cookers, even though Mr McKee is baffled by their popularity.

He added: “In the first three months, I visited all of our service centres and stores. When I came to the organisation, it was almost all full-time. Now, 38 per cent of our staff are part-time, in response to when customers want to interact with us.

“It means, for example, we can have more people working on a Saturday when, previously, customer communications and service was too slow. There were also problems with the supply chain when I came here.”

Another change concerned the group’s advertising and marketing: “Our customers are 75 per cent female. They watch television and read magazines. Consequently, we now sponsor Home and Away on Five. The flow of communication from customers helps us to fine-tune things. So, for example, we don’t sell entry- level sofas. Our customers don’t want them. They don’t want cheap and cheerful, they want quality.”

To that end, Mr McKee changed some of the suppliers, which resulted in Lebus, based in Scunthorpe, making a third of all furniture sold in the stores: “Furniture is an aspirational product for our customers but, if you sell it to them on a three-year payback, you don’t want it to fall apart in nine months. Lebus’s delivery and quality is superb. We keep talking about the death of British manufacturing, but I have to say their quality standards are striking.”

Despite the recession, BrightHouse is trading strongly, partly because many of its customers have always had to live within their means.

Mr McKee said: “We are looking for a fifth year of sustained growth. We are just putting together our results for the half-year to the end of September and sales are strong. We are seeing furniture sales absolutely boom. I put that down to the fact that, in October and November 2007, we appointed our first category manager in BrightHouse’s history. The quality is consistently good, the prices are competitive and delivery is on the button. We had our best-ever summer. July and August are normally slow, but sales just grew and grew this year.”

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