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Brian Kruger, founder of Universal Trade Frames, reflects on a challenging start to the year and what may lie ahead this year.
Universal Trade Frames has grown on the strength of a focus on quality and service, so that today it manufactures 800 frames a week, including a rapidly growing premium offer.
Operating from a 30,000 square foot state of the art manufacturing facility this includes the supply of the complete Residence Collection, including R9, R7, and R2; Optima Flush from Epwin; the Spectus Vertical Sliding Sash Window; and the Spectus Fully Reversible and Tilt-and-Turn options.
Brian Kruger, who founded the Shrewsbury-based fabrication business in 1996, arguing that the shift towards premium and foiled products have transformed today’s window and door market.
“It’s tough out there at the moment. It’s tough out there for everybody. It’s tough for people that are installing. It’s tough for us on a manufacturing front.
“Costs are increasing with minimum wage and that won’t just affect us, that’s affecting our installers. It puts pressure all round. It’s also not been the busiest start to the year, but you can feel that there’s momentum starting to pick up.”
“Colour’s been massive. I mean, to start off with, it was literally white or mahogany. Then they introduced oak. Then all of a sudden you start your new colours started coming in with the greys. The portfolio has just expanded to whatever colour you want, you can have.
“The range is just growing and growing and growing. I think there’s a great marketplace for PVC with the colour options that are coming.
“You’re now able to go into commercial projects and offer whatever they want that they could get in aluminium. And there’s a lot of benefits to PVC over aluminium. I’m not saying aluminium is a bad product. But it’s just that PVC is knocking on that door more and more these days.”
“The colour range now would be, around about 45% colour. Of the overall 800 products a week, you’d be looking at in the region of about 200 of those would be more specialist products. And when I say more specialist products, reversible windows, vertical sliders. Other than R9 we now class flush casements as a ‘standard product’.
“The flush casement market is massively important in supporting growth but the storm casement market has remained rock solid. You have a far better weather rating, just because of the way a standard casement is designed.
“Flush casements have gained traction because it’s a nice symmetrical looking window and it’s now a market sector on its own.
“It’s worth pointing out that not all flush casements are made equally. You either buy a product that’s been cheapened as much as possible to just be the lowest cost version that you can purchase, or you go down the route that we’ve gone down, which is to focus on quality.
“We manufacture the Epwin Flush Casement and offer the complete Residence Collection both of which rightfull hold their place in that premium category.”
“If you’re installing what we consider to be a premium product, you wouldn’t then fit the cheapest possible composite door with that range. So, adding in a solid door composite door just amplifies the quality that we’re looking at.
“As a solidor fabricator we can tailor the product to suite with the rest of the windows on the property, whether that be a foil finish or a matching ovolo detail. If you want to buy that premium quality product across the range, then we can offer it suited in every single product.”
“If you’re a smaller manufacturer, you’re probably only manufacturing your casements and your residential doors.
“You’ve then also got the issue of with the multitude of colours that you’ve got to stock. If they’re making 50 to 100 windows a week, they’ve got to still cover all the bases the colours that we do – and they’ve still got to then go out and find another supplier for their vertical sliders or for their composite doors.
“Whereas because of the scale that we’re at, we manufacture those in house, suite them together.
“If you look at some of the companies that now are our bigger customers, they were smaller fabricators, they then started buying their premium products, say their vertical sliders off us or their composite doors off of us, they’ve then added into that some of their colour range, so that they just focus on their white and they can reduce their stock down.
“Others have switched to buying in completely. We’re very much about partnership and what I mean by partnering is if they do mismeasure a bay window, and they’re on site and they need to rectify that as quick as possible, we’ll make it same day for them.”
“Manufacturing 800 frames a week is a good place to be. We have stability but we’re not overstretched which means that we can deliver on service.
“We’ll make the extra effort, our OTIF is consistently at 98.5% or above. You can get hold of our sales, technical or customer services team.
“We have scale so stability, but we still have a personal touch, which I think is what our customers like about doing business with us. They order. We deliver.”
“Things are now starting to move. There’s a lot of positivity now coming in, which is an improvement on the first quarter .
“There’s a little bit more confidence out there now. Inflation is coming down. Another bank is saying that we’re expecting the interest rate to reduce a couple of times at least this year. Talking to some of the local estate agents, the housing market starting to pick up again.
That just starts to get a bit of momentum going. People are starting to get used to the fact that this is now the new norm and they still need to get the work done.
“We’ve got different areas, different customers are saying that they’re feeling a lot more positive or they’re busier now than they’ve ever been.
London, funnily enough is still lagging behind a little bit, but as far as our customers outside of London are concerned, they seem to be picking up and picking up. It’s looking far more positive going into the second half of this year.”
Universal Trade Frames is one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of specialist windows and doors, including premium product ranges including the Spectus Vertical Sliding Sash Window; Epwin Flush Casement; the complete Residence Collection, and Solidor composite doors; in addition to its standard window offering.
It has been trading since 1996 with core values of the right Product, with Quality & Service at heart backed up with a world class 98% OTIF.
Universal Trade Frames operates from a 30,000 square foot state of the art manufacturing facility in Shrewsbury, Shropshire and employ 60 highly skilled personnel from manufacturing and despatch through to our customer support teams.
