Gerda: much more than a composite door
Pioneer Trading’s Danny Williams is showing Gerda residential doors again at the FIT Show. Just don’t think of it as yet another composite door, says Danny.
When Danny Williams, managing director of Pioneer Trading, questioned the poor quality and lack of service received from the industry’s leading composite door brands, he set about sourcing an alternative brand.
His aim was to find a composite door that presented acceptable standards of manufactured quality and installed performance.
He searched far and wide and settled on a range of doors produced by Polish manufacturer Gerda, relatively unknown here, but well known and respected throughout mainland Europe.
But says Danny, calling them ‘composite’ doors does not do them justice: “I began looking for an alternative composite door to sell in the UK…but if I am honest, Gerda isn’t that. It is not a mass produced, stack ‘em high, GRP skinned, foam core product. The way that Gerda doors are manufactured – engineered – is quite different from most doors sold as composites.”
According to Danny, Gerda doors offer an exceptional and easily communicated differential: they are faced with steel or aluminium. And they are designed and constructed quite differently. 60mm to 88mm front-to-back dimensions are offered, with thermal efficiency across the range between 0.79 W/m2K to 1.3 W/m2K.
Three chamber reinforced aluminium internal construction with PU cores, located into reinforced aluminium outer frames is utilised across all doors. The emphasis on security that is standard across all Gerda products, is rarely seen in any specification on composite residential doors currently available in the UK. Multi point locks, Teflon coated strike plates and anti-prise pins are standard throughout, with the highest specification hardware provided by Gerda itself, though with Fuhr figuring widely.
“Steel faced doors are unique in the home improvement sector; we haven’t found an alternative yet, and the aluminium doors are finding customers amongst homeowners looking for something to complement their aluminium windows and garden doors,” explains Danny.
“And our installer partners have said that when presented with Gerda as an alternative to conventional composite residential doors, homeowners are prepared to spend more to get the specification; they love the quality.
“The truth is, Gerda doors are of far higher quality and specification that anything else on the UK market, price-for-price,” says Danny. “So I had to bring them in…the product quality is superb, and the specification and performance are far better than anything else comparable. Whilst they are composite in terms of being manufactured from various materials, calling them that isn’t strictly accurate in the UK market.”
After the launch of Gerda at last year’s FIT Show, sales have been impressive: “We have been actively selling and installing doors in British homes since August and sales are now in full flow through a number of installers in the UK. And each of those is offering Gerda as an upmarket product that sits above their standard composite door offer,” he confirms.
Whatever the specification might be on paper, the quality of Gerda doors is best appreciated when sold through showrooms, says Danny: “Last year’s FIT Show was overwhelming for us, because Gerda doors are most impressive when people can see and try them for themselves: the weight, the feel, the way the locks and handles work…Gerda doors sell themselves when people have the opportunity to handle them, because conventional ‘composite’ doors cannot match the feel and operation offered by Gerda.”
And once they have made the comparison, adds Danny, the majority of retail customers are prepared to pay the difference over conventional composite doors. Installers looking at Gerda for the first time at the FIT Show last year, understood that.
“Even though I have been in this business for a long time I was reminded that quality sells,” says Danny. “And whilst I still have my issues with supplying doors to customers that are demanding specific brands of doors that are manufactured down to a price, when people are able to make comparisons, they will always go for the better product, as long as it is not ridiculously more expensive. And that is what we have with Gerda.”