Guy Hubble, joint managing director at RegaLead, talks about how Engineered Door Components offer the best upsell opportunity for installers when it comes to PVC-U-loving consumers. 

Keystone Market Research’s latest UK Consumer Fenestration Trends Report found that despite the huge success of composite doors, PVC-U is still a popular preference amongst homeowners for entrance doors, and demand for timber is growing too.

30% of 2025 survey responders chose PVC-U as their door material of choice, citing durability and low-maintenance as the top two reasons for their decision. Meanwhile, 20% of homeowners said they preferred timber for their entrance door with the main driver (for 55.8% of those respondents) being aesthetics.

Overall, the report says that kerb appeal is close to the top of the agenda when it comes to choosing a door, with Keystone Market Research reporting that style/appearance ranks at 4.41 out of 5 when it comes to homeowner priorities.

So, whilst consumer demand for better-looking doors in familiar PVC-U was growing, style and colour options were lacking in the industry’s PVC-U entrance door offering, compared to the depth of design choice, colour, and high-end aesthetics offered by other material options.

Our Engineered Door Component range was born from this gap in the market. Almost a happy accident of sorts, we were approached by a number of companies looking for a suitable decorative glass range for new engineered PVC-U door ranges. As our ‘bread and butter’ business, this was a perfect opportunity for us to design a range of decorative glass options for this evolving market to suit each individual door style, as we have done for many composite door collections.

Whilst we were working on the glass ranges, we realised that there was a bigger issue for PVC-U fabricators who wanted to create improved PVC-U door offerings – coloured panel and component availability. For a number of years, PVC-U systems houses have continued to push colour and have developed complex foil offerings. There are now almost 150 different colours regularly in use in the market, across all PVC-U profiles, and new foils are consistently being added.

However, manufacturing limitations and the challenges of minimum order quantities, meant that the panel suppliers weren’t able to keep up with the systems companies in terms of colour attainability. The door frames were available in many different colours, but the panels weren’t, making it very tricky to create a new PVC-U door collection that met the market requirements for colour and style.

PVC-U fabricators needed a solution to meet market demand for a timber-alternative door in the right colour range. As a supplier of value-added products, predominantly based around aesthetics, we saw an opportunity and this developed into the concept of a range of PVC-U panel products and mouldings in a wide range of colours, available in low order quantities.

Our Engineered Door Components Range is a complete set of PVC-U door panels and mouldings, available in more than 70 colour options on fast lead times and 100 special order colour foils.

It was crucial for our panels to deliver on timber-alternative aesthetics, so we created designs with flat, tongue and grooved, and raised and fielded door panels – each one engineered to create flawless balance, regardless of door size. Raised, moulded areas are equally distanced from the sides of the frame for perfect proportions and our colour-matched, decorative, bolection mouldings add perfect details.

Best of all, there’s no change to manufacturing processes or any need for additional machinery, so it’s a straightforward product addition for fabricators and it’s familiar PVC-U, so installers can already fit engineered doors with confidence.

The result is an engineered door range that offers the best of both worlds for homeowners – the familiarity of a durable and low-maintenance door material, with the beautiful aesthetics of timber, in a plethora of colour and design options, completed by our range of beautiful decorative door glass. With style so high on homeowner’s agendas, that’s an opportunity you can’t afford to miss.