End of a journey

Sandra Josephs has been a long serving member of the team at Burns & Ferrall Ltd, an iconic commercial and domestic kitchen componentry company of some seventy years standing. Bob Nordgren from JOINERS Magazine recently had the pleasure to attend a tasty lunch prepared by their showroom chef in their fantastic kitchen facility at their new headquarters in East Tamaki, Auckland which offered a chance to chat with Sandra in person. The following are her thoughts, in her own words, on the industry since she entered it some thirty years ago, her time with Burns & Ferrall and her impending retirement. We at JOINERS Magazine wish her all the best in her retirement.

After approximately 26 years with Burns & Ferrall, I have made the tough decision that it is maybe time to “hang up the boots”, and retire. I always thought that this would happen when I woke up one morning and realized that I didn’t want to do this anymore. However, that has never happened, (with the exception of the odd day of course), But I thought with the Covid pandemic, it might be a good time for both the company and myself to advise I would leave at the end of August. Then I get the added bonus of being able to stay in bed for an extra hour or two in the mornings!

At the start of my career in sales, I was working as a kitchen designer for 10 years, and then left to go and rep for HMC tapware – at that stage a division of Methven Tapware. When they closed their sales division down, I was advised that Burns and Ferrall, were in the process of employing a new rep, and so my new career started. Initially, I was working out of East Tamaki where we had a large warehouse where I went to learn and identify the various products