Industry Debate 5 - Conservatories

SAM KENNEDY, SPECTUS WINDOW SYSTEMS: If I could take the debate slightly further on as well and talk about the advantages, as Wolfgang talked about, of bringing more professionalism into the market itself. Alan has obviously gone down that route with the investment he has, not only in the product he has but also in the people, so they are improving sales at that level. If we drag that through on to conservatories now, it's always been an aspirational sell. Is that how the market is at the moment, Grahame?

GRAHAME HALL, ULTRAFRAME: As most of you know, I'm pretty new into the industry, but my assessment thus far would be that it's a bit like some of the lies that we’ve been talking about elsewhere. We sell white plastic boxes that are too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. It's not a satisfying product. I think until we get real about that we’re just kidding ourselves, we’re seriously kidding ourselves that we've got a good product. We sell cheap space, we sell easily acquirable space, but do we have a good product? No, we’re a mile off.

I suppose the acid test is that on the back of our house when we moved in there was a white plastic box that was 15 years old. You know what? It looks like the white plastic boxes you can buy now. I don’t know many other products that look very similar to ones from 15 years ago. Cars are different, computers are different, televisions are different. We’re in a ditch. I've used that phrase a few times. The conservatory market is completely in a ditch. It's just screwed itself. It's got itself to a point where it’s just beating itself up. Prices have dropped and dropped. It's got a value proposition that is just too low. When people see a conservatory for £4,000 or £5,000, it's too cheap. It doesn’t stand for anything, it doesn’t have any value.

As a result of that, you look at the macro economics and you say house prices might be settling down. The cost of moving is average £24,000 these days; that’s just in stamp duty. The average spend on a conservatory is about £12,000. We’re not hitting the right spot. If somebody wants to put light and space on the back of a house, which is fundamentally what a conservatory is, what are the choices? They either go for a cheap white plastic box which is completely unaspirational - they were very aspirational 20 years ago but they're not now - or you go and spend 60, 70, some unknown number, on a house extension. Those are your two choices. In the middle there's very, very little. They’ll buy an Amdega conservatory. That’s a snob brand. That’s not a value for money proposition. People like Amdega because they like to tell their mates they’ve got an Amdega conservatory, like they tell their mates they’ve got a Smallbone kitchen. It's not a genuine value purchase, so it will only ever appeal to a small part of the market.

So, I'm actually quite excited about the future of conservatories, but I don’t see them in white plastic and that might not be what you guys want to hear. I think unless we get out of that space we’re going nowhere and I think all that will happen is that we’ll all just beat each other up and offer a poorer and poorer quality product.

One of the biggest innovations has been glass. I'm being a tad cynical, but I think there are some important points in terms of how we go forward. The move from polycarbonate to glass and particularly to active blue has been a huge, huge move forward. I don’t think that’s been properly sold by the industry. The benefits of that isn’t really clear, but I think we've got to start being much more modern and get the wow factor back into our products. Somebody used the expression before saying, “Right for the house, I’m going to buy it because it's right for the house”. There aren’t many products people can get that are right for the house. There are a very, very small number of tiny joiners, people who will do odd jobs, but they're not well engineered and they don’t provide good value, so I think we’re stuck in a hole.

MIKE JACKSON, THE BURNDEN GROUP: Probably for the first time round the table actually somebody from Burnden will agree with somebody from Ultraframe! I think Grahame is 100% right. We sell plastic boxes, plastic roofs. There's not a lot of sophistication to it. I think it's come on as far as it can as far as a conservatory roof is concerned. If a consumer would look at a roof and compare one roof to another it’s much of a muchness to your product now. We've got to do a lot. There's a huge market for home improvement, for extensions. Now, whether that be a conservatory or an extension or a sort of a hybrid version I think that’s what we've got to look at. I think we've got to be a lot more imaginative in our design and it's about time we realise that. There's still going to be sold a lot of white plastic, you'll never get away from that, but we've got to use it in a different way. Glass, again, it's done a lot for our business in the last year. It's been a struggle anyway, the conservatory industry is a struggle, there's no two ways about it, but glass has done really well for us, thanks a lot to Pilkingtons, I must admit, with their advertising and market awareness. Luckily they’ve got the budget to be able to do that, but I think it's certainly helped.

RON HAMILTON, PILKINGTON: Let's be very clear about that. There was a massive discussion around that because we go back to the times of self-cleaning glass, if you couldn’t sell that and what a margin you would make. Taking the comment that was made before, in the initial strategy we found that the guy in the house was actually selling against active because it's actually easier for him to just take two panes and take his commission and walk out the door. For the first time in a long, long time Pilkington has decided to go directly to the consumer to actually use the credibility or the perceived credibility. We believe that Pilkington has a value in a name, so Pilkington, this is a name actually you can trust and actually active does work, so let's convince the consumer that that’s the case and do a draw through on that.

MIKE JACKSON: I think the pull through has been good. Pilkington is a recognised brand name. It's one of the few in our industry which is recognised, so we’ve benefited from your branding as an industry. That’s definitely helped, but that’s just one of the areas. We need to look at other areas as well.

SAM KENNEDY: Are there opportunities on conservatories? I just wonder. Again, you’ve come into it with a fresh look at it, Grahame, because you haven’t really been in it, but you made the point of having these white boxes and Michael earlier on talked about having a white box where you couldn’t get a chair into it because we’re selling it in flat packs. Is there a replacement opportunity there?

GRAHAME HALL: I think the market’s a bit stuck because there's nothing to improve to at the moment. So, “I have one of these, I'll go and look and the new ones look exactly the same as the old ones, so why should I bother? I'll spend my money on something else”. I think there's a huge replacement opportunity in time because quite a number of these conservatories have been around for some considerable time now, but we've got to give them something that’s different to what already exists.

The Ultraframe story is pretty well documented, but whenever a market and a company starts to go off the growth curve, then they tend to start doing things that, perhaps, aren’t always in the best long-term interests of the marketplace. One of those is you're dealing with tiny, tiny roof manufacturers or installers that can't actually add any value and your routes to market get all muddled up. We are in a very uncomfortable place because that’s what had to be done for Ultraframe to survive.

KEVIN HILL, JOHN FREDERICKS: Isn’t that an interesting point you’ve just made there? Again, maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm sure with the esteemed audience I'll be put right, but the whole notion of a conservatory to the home owner is that it is a space and you’ve got additional space or cheap space, affordable space, but the way that we get to market is not on a conservatory. You're roof people. You don’t sell conservatories.

GRAHAME HALL: Absolutely. I was going to come on to that.

KEVIN HILL: Our customers don’t sell conservatories. We sell frames that go into it. So you’ve got so many people with so many different skill sets, which we've already discussed today, that are not reaching the mark, is it any wonder we've got ourselves into a bit of a pickle, whereas the guys from Amdega - incidentally both Amdega and Smallbone were owned by the same company, Williams Holdings - were actually integrated into the supply trade. So, there might be some snob value there on the back of the colour supplement, but what happens is you’ve got a turnkey approach to it.

GRAHAME HALL: I'm just saying it's not a value for money product. I'm not saying it hasn’t got a place because I think it has. This is a public meeting and it would be very, very silly of me to do a Ratner here.

KEVIN HILL: I wasn’t suggesting you were, by the way.

GRAHAME HALL: There's a difference in the way Amdega go to market and we currently go to market, and I think that limits in some respects the opportunities that we can exploit, but I'm not going to talk about it broadly in this arena.

NIGEL RICHMOND, FENSA & BOWATER BUILDING PRODUCTS: There's been a massive change and I think you're being a bit harsh. I think the conservatory product has come on in leaps and bounds over the last ten years.

GRAHAME HALL: I'm sure it has but it's still rubbish.

NIGEL RICHMOND: No, I think you're being a bit harsh. I think if we look at it from a roof point of view, the frame side of it has moved on. Now, the bulk of conservatories were sold via Wickes, B&Q and all of the sheds. They have virtually stopped selling them. I accept and I think the product that went through those channels didn’t do us any favours, but the product has shifted away from those sheds now. Every window company wants to call itself a conservatory company now because it sort of raises its image. The specialists have always been there as well and, sure, Amdega can add on £10,000 to £15,000 just for the brand. Funnily enough, I think their conservatory is worse than a PVC conservatory because they’ve never been able to get the timber part of it correct. But it's a product that’s moved on. It can move further.

GRAHAME HALL: I think the shed product I completely agree with you. That was a bad route taken.

NIGEL RICHMOND: We are working for one shed now. They’ve asked us to do a rectification programme for them - I won’t quote names - and we’re doing a rectification programme for them on their screamers, as they would call it, where they’ve got real problems. So far they’ve given us about a hundred and something to rectify, of which nearly half we've had to totally rebuild.

DAVID RUZICKA, SASH UK: But, Grahame, don’t you think one of the problems, again, with the conservatory sector is that the systems companies, the roof component companies, you don’t see loads of Amdega people all over the place, but you see loads of Ultraframe people?

GRAHAME HALL: Absolutely, that’s the point I was making, that you get yourself into an uncomfortable place where your distribution doesn’t work for you because it's not concentrated enough.

ALAN BURGESS, MASTERFRAME WINDOWS: I would also add into it, though, that you made the comment about the Amdega conservatory at £60,000, £70,000 isn’t good value. If you're looking at things from a cost plus - and I'm afraid the PVC industry has done that all the time from the very first software that you ever had - why you go cost plus to make a top-hang fix when the same material is in a top-top fix-fix side-hung, it’s going to take you more time to make than the other. But to the person who’s buying it, that may be fantastic good value and that’s the thing. We’re all looking at it from the blinkered, “We make it for this and we sell it for that and can we afford it?” Get off that, find out what the value is to the person who’s buying it.

GRAHAME HALL: Absolutely, no, I agree with you, and my point was really around the fact that we will quite happily spend £25,000 of dead money to move, but we haven’t got a product around the £25,000 to £30,000 mark which is aspirational and we should have.

NIGEL RICHMOND: The number one aspirational product still for a housewife is a conservatory.

GRAHAME HALL: We should have something and it's shame on us because Amdega do sell their conservatories for £60,000 and £70,000 and £80,000 and they do it in exactly the way you describe it. It's seen as good value, it's within that space, but it’ll never be a volume product because it's just simply too small a market.

NIGEL RICHMOND: Is it about volume or is it about profit?

GRAHAME HALL: No, it's not, it's about value. If you take Ryanair’s model of air travel, what we've got with Amdega is BA. What Ryanair have done by squeezing out and making a value for money offer has made the market for air travel much, much bigger. I think you can do the same with conservatories. I'm not talking of volume gain necessarily, what I'm saying is somewhere between a cheap, white plastic box and Amdega lies a number of other answers, and that’s the challenge for the conservatory industry going forward.

MICHAEL NAGLE, PROFITMAKER: To get that across now you're thinking like that, that needs a combination between the roof manufacturers and the glass companies, so a combination advertising from Pilkingtons and frames pitched at exactly what he's said, the customer’s mind, “I want a £40,000 extension on the back of my house”.

GRAHAME HALL: Absolutely.

MICHAEL NAGLE: But it has to come from that kind of high level advocate and where do you get one? Through the VEKA network or through whatever.

GRAHAME HALL: Only if it's white plastic.

MICHAEL NAGLE: Well, it can be coloured. I suggest you do a colour.

GRAHAME HALL: My point is it might not be plastic.

MICHAEL NAGLE: That’s the route it has to go.

NIGEL RICHMOND: David, how many of your frames end up underneath a conservatory roof?

DAVID RUZICKA: Probably I would say only about 20% of them.

NIGEL RICHMOND: Only 20%? I heard yesterday the figure within industry was 27% of frames. We were just talking about how difficult the window market is. Where would we be if the conservatory market hadn’t come along? Even in its current depressed state the conservatory market provides an awful lot of frames to go underneath those roofs.

MICHAEL NAGLE: We’re still talking about frames. What about contribution?

NIGEL RICHMOND: Well, Amdega was bust two years ago.

GRAHAME HALL: If I can phrase a financial challenge, which is really the problem I'm trying to solve and I guess other people in the sector are trying to solve. If I sell a conservatory roof I get about £1,000 of that £12,000 total install cost. If I sell it as components I get about £500. Now, my challenge isn’t to sell more roofs, my challenge is to get more value for every one that I sell. I don’t have to make the market any bigger to do that, I just have to start to offer better value. So, that’s how I'm going to measure my business and I suspect that’s how these guys are going to start measuring theirs. You can't actually go and sell another 10,000 roofs, they're not there, but if you can up your average price per roof then you start making more profit.

SAM KENNEDY: Wolfgang, were you going to make a point there?

WOLFGANG GORNER, REHAU: I was just saying we've basically come full circle because we’re back to the same issue that we had with the window industry, which is we’re giving product away left, right and centre. The conservatory product, yes, has got its flaws but, yes, I also agree that for the householder, particularly now the 30-something who needs extra space in the house, it's quick and easy. I was in Scotland yesterday reading the Daily Record, looking at the adverts at the back, and it's a standard £5,000 to £6,000 conservatory, that’s what the industry is doing to itself.

MIKE RIGBY: I think it's worse than that. Again, this echoes whoever said that it's not the consumer, Mrs Jones or Mrs Brown that’s holding things back. When the conservatory is sold, for every pound that the conservatory company gets paid, the consumer spends more than £2 extra doing other things because it's a real splurge opportunity. Whilst the conservatory has been increasingly sold on very competitive bases, the rest of it is actually spent freely and it's always been a joke about how much has been spent on blinds, etc, but it's everything else. It's not just inside, it's outside as well. They're going to spend it on paving and so on. So, it's a real opportunity for pleasure and happiness and all that the industry has been selling is the basic structure for somebody else to go and pick up all that added value, which seems daft to me.

KEVIN HILL: You ask the question of those people, which some of those are our customers and I guess there are some of yours as well there, you say, “Why don’t you go for the value adds, the blinds, the furniture, the under-floor heating or the cooling systems or the heat recovery systems?” “It's too much hassle.” Where do you go with that kind of mentality?

DAVID RUZICKA: It comes back to what we said earlier that you have non-professional people selling your products. The other thing that they’ll come up with is they’ll say, “I didn’t want to put that into the equation because I just wanted the deal for the conservatory and I didn’t want to put them off by trying to get the blind business and what have you”. This is because we have poor people. We don’t employ them, a lot of them, they’re commission only, and I have to ask why are they commission only? What are you going to get turning up for an interview for commission only? We’re asking them to sell an upmarket product, dare I say it, even to put some design into that product, yes, and commission only?

WOLFGANG GORNER: It's a bit like these adverts you see on the street side, “Do you want to earn some extra cash?” That’s basically what it is.

DAVID RUZICKA: Exactly. Then we ask why we have bad salespeople. Because that’s what we’re asking for. We’re actually advertising for the worst people to come and work for us. You’ve got a few who have been very, very successful in direct sales, but the majority of them are people who are not capable of doing it, that’s why they end up working for this industry.

WOLFGANG GORNER: It's a sad indictment, isn’t it?

ALAN BURGESS: Actually I think it's not quite that bad. I think going back a few years double-glazing was really, really all about pressure on the night. Thankfully, you look at Watchdog, most of them now are selling beds for the elderly or whatever. So, I do think that we’ve got a better industry than we had 15 years ago.

DAVID RUZICKA: Really? You obviously don’t get BOGOF then on your TV, buy one get one free. Have you seen the advert? My God, that has got to be ...

ALAN BURGESS: There are exceptions, but I think on the whole it's got to be a better industry than what it was.

DAVID RUZICKA: Yes, but I still don’t see the sales people are better.

WOLFGANG GORNER: That’s what people see, though. That's a very valid point, that. That’s the one company that does national advertising --

GRAHAME HALL: Yes, and they are desperate, aren’t they?

WOLFGANG GORNER: Absolutely, yes, but that’s what we are. I'm sorry, I'm going to say this now, but if you want to have a conversation stopper as I had yesterday coming back on the plane from Glasgow, and you’ve got somebody sat next to you who you don’t really want to talk to, the best thing to say when they say, “What do you work in?” is say, “Double glazing”. That kills it.

DAVID RUZICKA: He feels for his wallet first!

WOLFGANG GORNER: No, it's true, it is.

MIKE JACKSON, THE BURNDEN GROUP: The insurance industry was the same, wasn’t it, 10 or 15 years ago, unregulated with the sales people. Now it's regulated and you have to have professionally trained sales people in insurance.

DAVID RUZICKA: It's all sales training which brought about that transformation and getting rid of the commission only guys because the commission only guys don’t exist in insurance.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, the nickname for Allied Dunbar was “Allied Crowbar”.

DAVID RUZICKA: But that is a big factor for a lot of the industry. There are people sat round here and obviously yourself who are successful sales people and what have you, but the majority of us would deal with people who have no idea of what they're selling, no idea how to design a conservatory, no idea even how to order one from me. You get a sketch with a few sizes on the thing and they go, “Can they have that next week?” I go, “What do you mean?” Monday to Friday they want you to turn a conservatory round for them, and I go, “Well, base, have we done a base?” “Yes, we’ll get round that, don’t worry about that.” The whole thing is totally unprofessional. But you look at them and you say, “Well, what sort of design is it going on?” “Oh, it’ll be all right, just a couple of openers outside, couple of openers outside, put his doors there.”

KEVIN HILL: Then they get mad with you when you say, “You can have it within a five-day turnaround”. “Good God, five days!” Like you're the only people making frames for them. The reason why we have that, we build in so much - you could argue cost, downtime, whatever it is - from actually getting a fax to putting it into production because we go back so many times to the customer and get them to sign it off before we start cutting anything. That is a cost to the industry that ought not to exist.

DAVID RUZICKA: Just before I came away yesterday, one of them - and we refused to make it because we only make to within what we feel are the right tolerances - for a conservatory it was 3.7 metres long by 16.70 high, which he wanted making in one frame. Now, forgive me if anybody does make those in one frame, but you shouldn’t. This is going into a conservatory and this has come from a very, very well respected company, and that’s purely because the salesman doesn’t know what he's selling. I said to him, “Sorry, I am not going to manufacture it”. “Oh, I'll go and get it from so and so then” and he will.

MALE SPEAKER: Somebody else will manufacture it.

MICHAEL NAGLE: I presume they order all these on fag packets?

MALE SPEAKER: Since the smoking ban it’s been a bit hard!

DAVID RUZICKA: Certainly if you're going to try and kick something off, I think training for sales people and an industry that, as I say, didn’t employ commission only ones would be an excellent way to kick this thing off because no matter what we say here and what we do with upgrading the product, if we haven’t got the right person selling it at the end of the day, we’re going to end up with a fantastic product sold at the lowest bottom market price.

NIGEL RICHMOND: I guess the one thing that may well force that through is if in the next round of building regulations conservatories come under building regulation control.

MARTIN ALTHORPE, BPF: There's whispers again, isn’t there?

NIGEL RICHMOND: Well, they put it off. Then they said this year, next year, then they put it back and then they said there were no plans and then all of a sudden it's come forward from no plans to, “Oh, well, we might consider it in the next building regulation”.

MARTIN ALTHORPE: Well, it's interesting, isn’t it, because when they came up with it, though, originally, they said, “We want to introduce building regulations for conservatories”, the industry went, “Oh, you can't do that”. It is what we are talking about now. “You can't do that because it will destroy the industry, it will reduce the volume.” We spent a huge amount of time defending our position and rejecting that idea and what we are probably talking about now is that that might have been a good idea.

DAVID RUZICKA: I think it is.

NIGEL RICHMOND: That’s presuming you can get things through building regulations within a reasonable period of time to actually process the order. Our average process at the moment for anything that goes through building regulations is a minimum of nine months.

GILES WILLSON, BFRC & GGF: The other problem with building regulations is you can have a written building regulation but if it's controlled by building control, one council to another council to another council, three different sets of rules, and that’s what makes it really hard. No matter how good you’ve trained your sales guy, put everything in, if you’ve got different rules for different counties ...

DAVID RUZICKA: Yes, but that’s not really a problem if you’ve got a system in place that works. I supply I don’t know how many conservatories and large span buildings to America, to probably six or seven different states, and every state does have its own ...

GILES WILLSON: No, I don’t mind if it's different rules if you know what the rules are, but it’s if you’ve got one set of rules interpreted by different councils. It's completely fine if you’ve got different sets of rules between England and Scotland, for example, where there are different sets of rules, live with that, fine, you know what the rules are, you can quote, manufacture, that’s okay, but when you're looking at between Coventry and Northampton, very close, both of them, two different counties, two different building controls, two different sets of rules.

MARTIN ALTHORPE: There is a way of getting type approval for generic designs and things, though, isn’t there, which you can use?

TOM RITCHIE, CGI: Sam, rather than reinvent the wheel, the most successful membership scheme in the history of the glass business I would suggest is FENSA. Does Nigel or Giles think there's any way that this sort of training could be launched and even funded?

NIGEL RICHMOND: Conservatories don’t come under FENSA for a start.

TOM RITCHIE: Well, maybe one day it will.

NIGEL RICHMOND: It could do, yes, but I think it’s a self-assessment scheme, isn’t it, because building controls, if it does go under building controls, they can’t cope. There’s no way they’ll cope with that as well. So you'll be looking for some sort of a self-assessment scheme.

TOM RITCHIE: But if you're looking for a medium to put this training in place you’ve got the membership.

NIGEL RICHMOND: We put a proposal together two years ago now and it would have covered that and it would have been a three-stage inspection virtually, obviously, from foundations through to walls and then through to the roof and, of course, you would have needed training into that area. So, yes, I think it would have worked if such a scheme had come in, and that’s one, because you’ve got legislation behind you, because it becomes mandatory, you can get that enforced and through there, but without that backing I think there's not much chance for that.

MARTIN ALTHORPE: There was discussion, wasn’t there, with the FENSA scheme? It had to be implemented quickly and it actually does a really good job, but compare it with something like the CORGI scheme. It doesn’t bear any comparison, really, does it, because the CORGI scheme suggests if somebody is a CORGI installer that they’ve been through some kind of training and they’ve reached some kind of competence level, whereas with FENSA ...

NIGEL RICHMOND: Well, CORGI was in place before and a very successful scheme.

MARTIN ALTHORPE: Yes, I know that. I do realise.

NIGEL RICHMOND: The danger is that FENSA is a victim of its own success because everybody out there wants a badge. Some badges are very difficult to get hold of. The FENSA badge isn’t difficult to get hold of, so that’s why everybody suddenly grabs it and they go round and all their advertising says, “I'm FENSA”, which means nothing. It's not an approval system, it's not a guarantee of quality.

MARTIN ALTHORPE: What's the progress on the Trust Mark because that takes things a little bit further.

NIGEL RICHMOND: Well, Trust Mark is the son of something else and the son of something else and the son of something else. It's at least the fourth generation, and each time I think the government has been very, very keen to make it a success and the previous three have failed. So, this time the government are very keen to make it a success. So, why does it make it a success? It makes it easier and easier to become a member of Trust Mark and all the time it's going to become easier and easier to become a member of Trust Mark and the levels are not going to be as high as they should be, and it is now becoming quite easy to become a member of Trust Mark.

KEVIN HILL: I think the CORGI thing is interesting as well and the ACOPs. Having worked in that industry as well, it's looked upon as a pretty good model for having approved installation done when these people are dealing with a homeowner. What's happening within that sector now is that lots of people who are of a certain age in the plumbing and heating trade are not paying the money to get the necessary ACOPs training, so you find fewer and fewer people are actually qualified to fit gas appliances. They’ll come in and they’ll sort your sink out, they’ll come in and do a bit of shower work, they’ll do the toilet, they’ll do all that sort of stuff, but when it comes to connecting gas anywhere, they don’t have the accreditation because they've not paid the money, they think it's an affront to go on a training course because they did their apprenticeship and their City and Guilds and, “Why should I? I'm a 50-year-old or 55-year-old proud man. I know how to fit gas. I'm not going to spend £1,000 to £1,500 of my money to have some suit tell me what to do”. There’s a real problem there now and it's getting worse because there are fewer and fewer people who will be able to come and connect gas to your house.

The government has tried to address that by throwing some money at it, which is really part of the government’s new deal which said, “If we can fund 6 months’ worth of training for people who have been on the dole for 12 months, will that help the paucity of numbers in this field?” The industry said, “No, because six months is no good whatsoever”. So, we’re not the only industry with issues at the installation end when it comes to accreditation and having proper skills in place, and CORGI was just about bankrolled by a monopoly, which is British Gas after it was privatised and prior to that as well. I'm sorry to keep coming back to your organisation, but the closest we have to that in the industry is Pilkington, who did and does throw a lot of money at GGF and industry bodies to ensure that there is --

RICHARD SCHWARZ, THE GLAZINE: Well, it doesn’t throw it!

KEVIN HILL: I didn’t mean the word pejoratively.

RON HAMILTON: No, it's nice to hear and it is a good position for us because I think everybody in the room knows the right thing to do for the industry but it has to contribute to a bottom line, doesn’t it? Certainly within the GGF - and FENSA was embryonic from the GGF in how it grew up - there was a need. We’ve touched on legislation a number of times. The driver with CORGI, presumably, and within our own, the Part L, and the changes in the industry, has been the legislation. Actually, it's a credit to the industry that with Part L the compliance was so high because there was a great deal of doubt with Part L that anybody would bother with it because of the number of people that were in the white vans, but comply we did. I believe that most of the industry saw benefit from Part L in terms of opportunities to add value.

Just to comment on the cold box in winter and the hot box in summer, of course there are glass products that address that issue if you choose to take the opportunity and pay the money for them.

GRAHAME HALL: But there are not much of them in the market price, that’s the problem. That’s only the new product and the problem that we have is we don’t sell that difference. So, we don’t sell that so people go and they look exactly the same as the ones that they brought last time. It’s got a glass roof, yes, okay, so it's not noisy when it rains, big deal. The temperature thing’s really, really hard to be believable upon and given the industry’s got a reputation for over-selling it's a tough one.

ALAN BURGESS: But, Grahame, that’s your job.

GRAHAME HALL: I know, absolutely. I'm not shying away from that, absolutely not. That is completely my job.

ALAN BURGESS: Educate the buyer so they become knowledgeable and understand that investing in what you're going to do is well worth the extra.

GRAHAME HALL: All I will say on that is watch this space, that’s exactly where we are, but it's something that historically hasn’t been done.

KEVIN HILL: Is that because you as a business have been a system supplier in there as opposed to the supplier of a complete piece of kit?

GRAHAME HALL: I think that’s been part of the problem that it's been regarded as a business-to-business brand where in reality what he needs to do is what Pilkington are doing on a smaller scale, which is you’ve got to step into the consumer arena and make a point and then hopefully that starts to pull it through in a better way.

KEVIN HILL: A company that’s not here could argue they’ve already done that, haven’t they? As Synseal would say, ask for it by name. They are selling not roofs there but conservatories, aren’t they?

MICHAEL NAGLE: If you consider what Ultraframe did, you are now saying at £500 to £1,000 you're actually just selling a profile and bits and pieces, but you guys --

GRAHAME HALL: Most of what we sell is aluminium, not PVC.

MICHAEL NAGLE: Yes, okay, but you guys spent millions in research and patents and everything that you hold, you revolutionised the whole roof, and now you're talking as if it's only a £500 kit or £1,000 kit.

GRAHAME HALL: Exactly.

MICHAEL NAGLE: So, you definitely need to be tying up with Pilkington and have this media-type image for your product.

GRAHAME HALL: Exactly, and as Mike said, the whole thing has been sold too cheap. In terms of being able to put research and development behind that, we are getting to the stage - and we are going to do it because I don’t think we will find another route out - where you could just as easily put a line through it and then that whole sector will not develop unless someone does it on a niche basis.

NIGEL RICHMOND: Because you weren’t making that investment when you had a slightly higher bottom line as well, so it's harder to do it now.

SAM KENNEDY: Shall we have a break there? A quick cup of tea and then the last session we’re just going to throw some European legislation in.

Comments

[Martin Randall, Chairman of Crystal Direct]

As a large national trade fabricator, I was invited to attend the recent Industry Debate but had to pull out. However, I have followed it closely on this site and would like to add my comments. Some of Grahame Hall's (Ultraframe) comments are sensible and some misguided:

a) Branding is important and I don't think someone buys an Amdega conservatory just to brag about it. They pay a premium for what they perceive to be a quality product and service. Isn’t an important part of branding any product to achieve such perceived status with the general public, our ultimate buyers? If a company has a good product, great service and brand value then this is something that any sensible businessman would want for his company, I certainly do. I think Grahame is trying to say we should all have a more sophisticated product and therefore get paid more money for it. But I think generalisations undermine his point.

b) If Grahame were not pretty new to the industry he would know that historically it has always been price-led and it’s got lower and lower. I don't necessarily think that this is all bad. The window industry has always had little or no barriers to entry. Reduced prices and greater efficiency via volume production will eliminate those companies that don't understand fundamental business practices, so all that remain are professional companies. In the long run ‘cut-price-only’ companies will go bust.

c) Not all conservatories are ‘white boxes’ as Grahame asserts. If they're designed correctly and the installer gives the homeowner the right choices they can get a building that matches their aspirations. Yes, the majority of conservatories will always be predominantly ‘square and white’ and what’s wrong with that? Most homes are the same but they make the homeowners happy.