Twenty years ago, marketing wasn't a particularly complicated business. You persuaded people to buy things using a few tried and tested techniques. As we approach 2025, the marketing world is evolving at a dizzying pace and the strategies that worked just a few years ago are no longer cutting it. Andrew Scott, MD of Purplex Marketing, highlights how an all-encompassing strategic marketing plan can generate success for fenestration businesses in 2025.
Cover Story - Time to step up
We made a simple promise on thermal performance: that all our products would meet the tightened part L regulations introduced in the 2022 revision to building regulations. We achieved this by developing our own thermal break technology, Thermlock. Wider, multichambered and less conductive than legacy polyamide systems, writes Roger Hartshorn as he issues a challenge to the aluminium fenestration sector to be honest about true U-values.
Editor’s Comment
Chancellor Rachel Reeves had no option but to walk into the traps set by the last Conservative government. Anyone who has been awake for the past 14 years will realise that, if we want the finances sorted, this was a no-option budget. It had to be tough and rough, writes Editor John Roper. Probably the biggest trap of all was the Conservatives’ national insurance cut, which put Labour into the position of having to put it back up again to recover the money and very publicly taking it from 'working people' – which led to the ‘broken promises’ headline news.
This year’s business forum was titled Contemporary Façade Design and Delivery and alongside presentations from Ffion Lanchbury and Andrew Baker of Rio Architects, Oliver Bridge of Total Facade Solutions offered an in depth talk about façades. The conference culminated in a Q&A panel that included Andrew Lee of Bouygues, Liz Williams, Housing Delivery Specialist and Steve Bramhill of UL Solutions, writes CAB CEO Nigel Headford.
Designed to recycle
The big hot topics of this year’s glasstec, held at Düsseldorf messe in October, were ‘decarbonisation, digitalisation and circular economy’. We speak to Ulrich Knaack, head at the Chair of Façade Structures at the Technical University of Darmstadt and Linda Hildebrand, junior professor for recycling-friendly construction at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University Aachen who both forecast a growing market for used construction elements.
A real family feeling
Swindon-based Garden of Eden, one of Sheerline’s original fabricator launch partners, has now added the new Index bi-fold to its range, which means the company now carries every Sheerline window and door product available.
Controlling the acoustic
Reynaers Aluminium has developed an acoustic calculator to indicate the level of noise protection offered by its window, door and curtain walling systems, says James Murray.