Have you given away £thousands?
Upselling to a foil from a standard white window can add £thousands to an installer’s bottom line, says Rob McGlennon, managing director of Deceuninck.
The industry is coming through one of its busiest periods on record, but not necessarily its most profitable.
Installers have been stretched, jobs have been disrupted by Covid, and the less said about the supply chain the better.
The net effect is that installers should have been making money while the sun shone, but many haven’t; while they’ve never worked so hard, not everyone is going to have been as profitable as they thought.
The reasons are multiple; some have clearly been beyond anyone’s control, but some things you can influence.
We and our customers sell more colour, but as an industry in general, standard white product is still dominant. Therefore, for every white window fitted, installers, fabricators and the supply chain are losing margin.
We offer 30 colourways in stock and 20 additional colours in just 15 working days, and Deceuninck fabricators sell twice as much colour as their competitors.
Consumer research commissioned by Deceuninck and conducted by YouGov found that, given the choice, homeowners default to what they know, with white the first choice for more than 50% of respondents.
Your costs for a job are fixed regardless of if they’re white or foiled products. You need a salesperson to sell it, a surveyor to measure it, and an installation team to fit it, regardless of if its white or colour.
As labour and installation costs are your biggest single overhead on a job, if you can upsell to colour, you’re gifting yourself more margin and increased profitability for no more effort.
While pricing will vary depending on individual businesses and location, we’ve found that the installed value on an average three-bedroom house with six-to-seven windows and two entrance doors (excluding patios and bifolds) in ‘standard’ white, is on average, around £6,200. If the homeowner wants that same job in a standard foil, the uplift is around £1,550 (£7,750), selling at on average 25% more retail.
Switch out white windows for a flush casement on the same job and you’re looking at an installed value of around £12,400 but your labour costs – let’s say £70 per window and £150 a door, so £790 all in – remain the same.
Fitting costs don’t change. Sell a higher value product and you make more margin.
This means that up-selling to colour will add, on average, 20%-25% plus to your profit on every job, compared to how much installers make on a standard white window. Combining it with a flush casement and your profitability on that job jumps by as much as 112% over a standard white installation.
I understand that no job is ever that simple, and installers have a lot of additional overheads, but it does give you the picture and demonstrates how selling colour can add margin to your business.
So, what are the barriers to selling more colour?
Based on fabricator and installer feedback, availability of trims is a barrier, at very least limiting the range of colours sold, and potentially eroding profitability on jobs.
Sealants and the complexity of colour matching different product ranges, especially with a growing number of hybrid aluminium and PVCU sales, is another.
This is where Deceuninck’s patented Decoroc finishing system, which offers a picture-perfect match to the Decalu aluminium offer, delivers benefits to installers.
Deceuninck has also played heavily on colour as part of our award-winning Heritage Flush sash offer which, as a 70mm system, recreates the aesthetic of a 19th and early 20th century timber window, without the complexity of additional plaster cut-back associated with some systems.
PAS24 approved and achieving a WER A++ rating, it also comes with options on traditional ironmongery, and has been specifically designed for conservation areas with a dedicated colour range.
We stock matching colour ancillaries, trims and accessories to suite with each of our 30 stock colourways, and will continue to improve availability on non-stock colour trims.
The flip side of that coin is, that we help installers to up sell to colour because it benefits the whole supply chain. If you’re fabricating it or fitting it, the fixed costs are pretty much the same as standard white. That means anything on top goes directly onto your bottom line.