A specialism that counts

By Paul James, sales director, Extrudaseal.

There are a number of factors that have come together that make what we have to offer strike a real chord with fabricators and installers.

The first is cost. Fabricators are universally under pressure to keep a lid on their own overheads in the face of some pretty sizeable increases from systems companies.  

Our customers save on average 30%-40% on gasket costs by buying product direct from us, rather than going through their systems supplier as a third-party.

It’s a point that’s often over-looked but systems companies don’t extrude their own gaskets – they buy them in. That means that they incur costs twice over in handling, transport and distribution.

Extrudaseal gaskets leave our factory straight to our customers – there’s no middle man and that means we can keep costs low.

Extruding more than 20,000km of gaskets in the last year, we can also tap into the economies offered by scale. This, and specialism in what we do, means that despite incurring some increases in cost in our own supply chain, we have been able to hold prices and not pass those increases onto our customers.

The second point is the growth that we’re seeing in the aluminium sector. Figures released by Palmer Market Research in March suggested that aluminium is on course to reach a 17-year high topping 220,000 frames by 2020. This includes continuing and exponential growth in aluminium bifolds, forecast at around 50% to 35,000 door sets.

We manufacture gaskets for a wealth of systems, including among others Smart, Aluk, Metaltech, Senior and Ikon. We and they are seeing growth on the back of wider growth in the aluminium sector.

This is where our specialism counts again. As well as offering reduced costs, we have pioneered a number of highly innovative solutions to deliver installation efficiencies and enhanced through-life performance.

This includes our new aluminium bifold door threshold gasket. Compatible with a number of leading aluminium systems, including Aluk, it uses a specially extruded semi-rigid PVC foot to deliver an enhanced fit and better weather sealing, also significantly reducing the risk of call backs.

We have also recently announced the launch of AeroSeal, our pioneering new through-colour aluminium bifold door foam gasket.

Ideally suited to dynamic applications, high performance foam provides greater ‘memory’ than traditional gasket systems. This is combined with a co-extruded rigid foot, which prevents the foam from being stretched during installation. This is simplified further through either click-and-fit or slide-in options.

Our new aluminium threshold gasket and AeroSeal will be among the innovations on show at the FIT Show.

We’re under no illusions that price is an important element of our offer but we’re also bringing innovations to the show which are easier to install, deliver better through-life performance and enhanced aesthetics.  

Our range is also available in more than 1,000 RAL colours and we’ll be launching our new high gloss piano black finish at this year’s show alongside RAL 9007 metallic silver gasket, which has been designed to provide a match to contemporary silver powder coated installations.

Our own research reveals significant growth in sales of colour gasket. A year-on-year comparison of sales reveals that 84.1% of the gasket we sold 2014/15 was white or black, with 15.9% greys or colours.

Roll on a year and colours and grey gaskets now accounted for more than 25.2% of sales, with greys by far and away the most popular special colour.

The impact of colour gasket can have on the overall aesthetic of a door or window shouldn’t be underestimated. It almost blends away into the frame. Selling into the end-user that’s a real point of differentiation and for fabricators, an opportunity to add significant value to their offer for only a very small additional spend.

The other point that we would like to make, albeit that we can’t really showcase it on the stand, is that if we don’t have the right solution, we’re happy to work with customers to develop new tooling to deliver it.

We also have an extensive back catalogue of more than 600 gaskets, so if you’re doing replacement work, in the vast majority of cases we can offer a direct match to original installations.  

If you’re buying gasket in any shape or form, it really is worth coming and talking to us.

M55