If We Want To Improve The Industry Image, We Have To Sell On Design

Traditionally, window and door purchases have been seen as the poor relation to other major purchases, such as new cars, kitchens and bathrooms. And frankly it’s all our fault. The day PVCu came to the UK, we wanted to stack them high and sell them cheap. The idea of selling on quality, service and reputation escaped a lot of businesses. Instead, many then and now, fight it out at the bottom of the pile, undercutting each other, ruining profit margins and in some cases going to the wall because of it. One of the biggest symptoms of this selling style has been the design of windows and doors. There are some damn ugly first generation windows and doors out there on people’s homes, and that really isn’t a great advert for our industry.

Windows and doors should be aspirational

That was then, this is now. We have a whole host of new products at our disposal as an industry to be able to transform the look of any person’s house.

Colour plays a big part of that. Gone are the days of white, Rosewood and Light Oak. The three colours which made every street in the UK look very much the same. But you only need to look at these doors to see how far we have come on the colour front:

Doors have done wonders for the exploration and expansion of colour in our industry. Where many homeowners are perhaps a bit reluctant to go all out on a single colour for all the windows in their home, doors can be treated as stand alone items, and are therefore seen a bit differently.

At our place we have been designing and installing lots of custom doors over the past couple of years. But now coloured windows are really starting to take off. Cream, Agate Grey, Anthractive Grey, Schwarzbraun and Irish Oak are proving popular at the moment.

A house going from boring white panel doors and white windows to bespoke entrance doors and funky heritage coloured windows really does transform the look and feel of a property. And that effect is what our industry should be selling itself upon. A product previously seen as clunky, un-sexy and boring, that in truth is one of the most important purchases to keep heat in, burglars out and a home looking at it’s very best.

The challenge is undoing all the bad things our industry has done over the past few decades. Sales people selling what is easiest, not what might look best but takes a little longer to sell. Designing awful frames that ruin the look of some really nice properties. Well we have got past that stage now. With all the product choice out there, there is absolutely no excuse for any window and door to ever not look it’s best in any house. Having a focus on design, aesthetics and style I believe is the best platform for our industry to operate on. There is so much time and energy spent on promoting design of other products to people, our industry should be doing the same. Price won’t matter so much, and we can shift the spotlight back to quality and reputation.