Discounters High on Trendy Housewares : Retailing: Makers of upscale kitchen items find their merchandise is selling like hot cakes to the K mart crowd.

There was another sign of the changing retail times at a trade show of housewares manufacturers: Discount stores and other mass merchandisers are grabbing a larger share of the market for upscale coffee makers, cookware and kitchen appliances.

Manufacturers have found that the people who want to make espresso at home are the same ones who now shop at K mart.

Mass marketers such as K mart Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Target stores have gone upscale in accordance with buyers’ tastes, said Douglas White, a spokesman for Nordic Ware, a maker of upscale cookware.

“Ten years ago, the majority of our business was being done with department stores. Today, by far, the majority of our business is being done with various mass merchandisers,” White said by telephone from Minneapolis.

Thomas P. Conley, executive director of the National Housewares Manufacturers Assn., agreed. “What we’re seeing is people getting less hung up . . . on (a store’s) image.”

“If you got good value . . . that’s what’s important. I think more and more people are feeling that way,” said Conley, whose association concluded its 95th International Housewares Show last week.

George Hite, a spokesman for Target, a division of Dayton Hudson Corp., said the trend has been strongest in the past two years.

“A lot of the brand names that have associated themselves with both style and quality, and traditionally have been available through specialty stores and department stores, are beginning to appear in stores like ours. Braun is a good example,” he said.

Braun Inc., the German manufacturer of coffee makers, came to the United States in 1985 and starting selling right away to discount chains, including Wal-Mart and K mart.

Thanks to heavy advertising, Braun sales are still rising significantly, an accomplishment that would have been impossible without discounters, said Jorgen Wedel, president of Braun’s U.S. business. The firm is now owned by Gillette Co.

Leon Dreimann, president and chief executive of Salton-Maxim Housewares Inc., a company that makes upscale kitchen utensils and espresso makers, said discount retailers recognize they need to offer “good, better and best” products.

“We first started selling to Target, Wal-Mart and others about three years ago. And we’ve grown dramatically each year with those customers,” Dreimann told the Chicago Tribune.

But Dreimann and others conceded that there is a limit to what they can sell in discount chains, which are less well equipped than specialty stores to handle elaborate food preparation tools such as $250 bread makers.

Dreimann said he still views department stores and specialty retailers like Crate & Barrel Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc. as the best places to sell the most expensive items or those that require detailed instruction.

The four-day housewares show drew 1,944 exhibitors, more than had been expected after the association announced it would hold only one show each year, instead of the two it has held annually for almost half a century.

“The need for a large number of consumer product shows--international shows--is virtually gone with the contraction of the number of buyers that are out there,” Conley said. That drop in buyers is partly due to the rise of mass merchandisers, he said.