Target News

Blog May 2023: Buildtestbuildtestbuildtest - Building the Best

You’d be forgiven for thinking that May wouldn’t be a ‘peak’ month for PC sales – people are saving for holidays, Easter’s just happened and this year’s financial budgets have largely been allocated – but we’ve been busier than ever, with more custom and off-the-shelf PCs going out the Target door than ever before. But why?

I’m Cory, the Commercial Builds Manager at Target. You might know me from my days in the Marketing Department and, if so, you’ll also have seen me step away and get a lot more involved in the PC builds side of the business. That’s largely because I’m the one responsible for creating the Custom PC Builder and it’s customer-facing version, the In-Store PC Builder.

For the past 10 years, we’ve been building desktop PCs in-house from our dedicated Build Room and I’ve been right in the thick of it, from designing the best value PCs for the widest range of applications as our Target builds, right down to the nitty-gritty of building Custom PCs on behalf of our customers who need it, well, for a whole host of things, many of which we would NEVER have thought of (monitoring milk production, testing cars, running the signalling on national rail networks, full-blown cockpit-sized flight simulators, to name just a few).

Over the course of that decade we’ve run up a very steep learning curve, constantly modifying and improving processes to make them slicker and more efficient, and we’ve made significant impacts on the market, not least with the launch of the Custom/ In-Store PC Builder and the range of PCs available. And I say ‘range’ when it’s a little more than that. Several trillion configurations more...  

With hundreds of resellers now selling custom PCs to their end-user customers and being celebrated for their inexhaustible offerings, we’re now experiencing some less-expected benefits, all of which seem to have happened all at once.

Components manufacturers LOVE being included in PC builds. Why? Well, their products are rarely promoted or seen as part of a finished PC. They also get their brand out there without having to advertise - as we’re now beginning to realise, Joe Public extolling the benefits of a product or brand is WAY more valuable than advertising alone.

So, we now have Kingston memory and storage, Gigabyte motherboards and GPUs, and Antec cases as ‘preferred partners’ in our own, Target builds. That means we get absolutely the best build-component prices from those manufacturers, as well as allocation of stock being made available to us for new product or those in short supply.

With our builds business accelerating so quickly, it means we’ve had to expand our capacity significantly with a 50% increase in the number of builds engineers we employ and a 100% increase in our testing capabilities (the number of PCs we can test at any one time). And that means we can build even more, more quickly. When we set out on our journey, we said that 90% of all Custom PC builds should be built and dispatched with a 3 day lead-time, and we’ve never dropped below it, even when we’ve had orders for hundreds of PCs for schools, universities and businesses.

Our off-the-shelf PC business has also grown rapidly as we have continued to prove build-quality and value across the range. Initially starting with a few PCs loosely-designed around home, business and education specs, we soon learned that there was quite a lot of overlap, and the longevity and futureproofing devices is often as important as the price. In fact, we’re seeing a lot of customers supplying ‘commercial’ institutions who are paying more per unit because they know Target PCs will last – we provide a standard 3-year warranty with all PCs built at Target that can be upgraded for just £25 – and if there are any problems, we can usually swap faulty components out within 24 hours, rather than a delay of days as the whole PC doesn’t need to be returned in most cases.

This 10-years’ experience and monitoring of the specifications bought resulted in the launch of the Quick PC Builder. Designed around the more populated Custom PC Builder, the Quick PC Builder offers a few case form factors, with a limited choice of the most popular processors, memory and storage options that can be assembled quickly and dispatched en masse for use in education and businesses, all with a very quick turnaround, and very little-to-no technical knowledge.

As with all PCs, you need an operating system and we’ve been installing Windows on behalf of customers for years – with the reseller, not Target, as the named ‘owner’ of each PC. You can now add this as an ‘extra’ or to be preinstalled on the Custom PC Builder, In-Store PC Builder and Quick PC Builder.

A lot of what we’ve learned has come from discussions I have had personally with some of you – many, many of our customers have been building PCs for years, you know all the ins-and-outs, all the hazards and, for any advice you’ve offered, I thank you sincerely. Some of the best discussions I’ve had, where I’ve learned the most, have come from one of you seeing if we can design a PC for a particular task. The technical requirements and physical specifics can be troublesome but the solution is never far away, it just involves discussions with manufacturers, the build engineers themselves (who have an enormous wealth of experience – Tony, our Senior Build Engineer, is a well-regarded, record-breaking overclocker himself!) and, most importantly, the customer. I don’t want to stop those conversations, so please please keep testing us with your build requirements, whatever they are.

So then, May 2023, why’s it been so busy? Well, there’s no seasonal reason, no new-product reason, and no financial reason we can think of. Instead, we think it’s the culmination of 10 years learning, building, testing, failing, failing again, learning, building, testing and finally winning. That combined with our determination to try new things, finding new ways of complimenting and growing our customers’ businesses, our extremely high build standards and the quality of our end products that has led to the lion’s share of our builds business coming from word-of-mouth.

Really, May hasn’t been any different to any month in the last few years post-lockdown. All this time has seen us steadily growing the services we offer and the number of PCs we can build, so it stands to reason that that side of the business is growing. It’s growing for Servers Plus too as its reputation for high-quality business PCs (that will easily stand up to big brand devices with similar specs) is gathering speed with business customers.

We’re also very fortunate to have a team with such focus on build-quality and aftersales service, from the guys building the PC in the first place through to our devastatingly well-oiled Customer Services team who go way beyond our experiences elsewhere.