Showtime for composites
Greg Kelly, managing director of Entrance Composite Door Solutions, highlights some of the latest product developments in the composite door sector, after a very busy and potentially lucrative FIT Show.
There’s nothing better than a trade show to experience new product developments, whether you are at the Geneva International Motor Show in March, or at our humble FIT Show.
With time to reflect, it was the perfect platform for us to launch our new brand and to engage with customers and the industry with our expanded package for fabricators who want to manufacture composite doors.
The market for composite doors is in a good place, with a typical annual growth rate of 7%-9% and strong margin opportunities for manufacturers and installers. However, the rapid growth in the sector has also been blighted by higher product failure rates with door slabs bowing or even delaminating and so for many companies, a new composite door partner was high on the agenda at the show.
As an independent company that is not tied to one particular slab manufacturer, we are able to source slabs that we feel are a better fit for the market and for purpose, and so with some slabs with a 4mm double skin, along with a foam and timber core, we believe we have a product that’s arguably one of the best in the sector. The robust nature of the stile and rails also means that we’ve done much to resist the bowing and twisting issues that plague some of the door slabs in the sector.
Reflecting on the FIT Show, it seems that there are a number of trends influencing composite door design and specification, beginning with the outer frame. With demand from the window sector for mechanical joints, Timberweld, and other welding technologies, similarly we had the same level of interest for our doors. These were proudly displayed with Kömmerling 70 door frames, painted in various colours and full mechanically jointed.
The industry demand for diversity in colours continues to increase by the week, and so at the FIT Show we presented a number of coloured frames and doors including heritage options and the latest metallic finishes to our contemporary doors. These smooth contemporary doors have also been designed with aluminium insets into the face of the slab, given we have a 4mm skin to play with, and the response was quite overwhelming. We’d taken a typical contemporary door, painted it with a metallic finish, and then bonded long aluminium inserts into the face.
On these painted doors we’re also promoting a painted hinge edge. Afterall, consumers who are spending £1,500-£3,000 on a new front door won’t be satisfied with just a mere white edgebanding – they want careful product detailing. Customer demand is also fuelling the growth in our customer base as an increasing number of companies look at composite door manufacturing.
The Entrance is very much the complete partner for the sector, which starts off with our core offering of prepped slab, with the option of glazing cassettes and glass, including pre-glazing. Our kit option takes this one step further with the addition of all hardware from the likes of Brisant Secure and Winkhaus, plus an ekey option, which introduces the latest fingerprint recognition technology to composite doors.
Finally, our most complete product option includes the provision of a painted Kömmerling 70 frame with either welded or mechanically jointed frames. So, everything including frame, slab and hinge edge are fully colour matched, supported by our largest investment in a colouring plant, thanks to Regalead and Schuberts.
While the focus still has been on making composite doors even more appealing with mechanical joints, metallic finishes and aluminium inserts, there’s also an underlying demand for better performance credentials on doors, as visitors to our stand clearly highlighted.