Despite the performance of our glass roof and other products continually increasing, for several years now we have been seeing falling order values in our markets be it through net shaped pricing, overall size or headline metre square rates. We understand this – it’s just business and like everyone else in the fenestration industry we remain focused on improving the value to our customer, controlling costs and helping you to differentiate your business with our class leading products such as Ultra 86.

Recently however we’re seeing a specific shift in the glass roof market, with hybrid, lantern and other systems joining the glass mix we process and deliver nationwide as part of our SMARTGLASS offering. Whilst these less traditional product lines are undoubtedly sales opportunities, they’re also highly challenging as we see a whole new product stream of small glass orders making up an increasing part of our busy daily delivery commitments. These smaller orders usually have exactly the same demands in terms of lead time, geography, site locations etc, but they just tend to attract less sales value per delivery drop. Given our logistic costs are more or less fixed per drop as opposed to value of that drop, the net result is a huge imbalance in delivery cost vs delivered value.

We need to address both overall and on an order by order basis to remain a sustainable and important part of the supply chain for these low glass content installations. We trust you will understand that delivering a one off chargeable unit or a small order to any UK postcode without fixed contribution to the cost of getting it there is simply not viable, and will work with us in maintaining our element of the supply chain to everyone’s benefit. There are of course opportunities to fulfil these orders and avoid the unnecessary costs for all parties and this would remain our first option.

Advance, delay or combine a delivery, order side wall glass to accompany the roof glass, or even collect. We remain on hand to offer advice in combining delivery days etc and how to ‘play the system’ to minimise any impact, but we reluctantly advise that for orders placed we will be implementing a delivery surcharge of £150 for all orders under £400 in attempt to make these sales viable to us.

Thank you in advance for your continued support.