UK Glaze raises the bar with Gerda doors

UK Glaze has opened its doors on a new glass production unit with a showroom in Royston, featuring a premium Gerda door alongside its range of decorative glazing products such as splashbacks, mirrors, balustrading and wall panels.

Director, Mohammad Kaboutari has invested £400,000 in setting up the unit.

When Mohammad arrived in the UK he is reported to have had just £27 in his pocket. But he also had something else more valuable – his skills and knowledge as a master glazier, learned alongside his father back in Iran.

This allowed him to eventually open up his first business – MK Glass on the Caledonian Road in London, which grew into Empire of Glass 18 months later, as his reputation for quality workmanship and as a master glazier spread among property owners in the neighbourhood and beyond. As the business name grew, so did requests for related products, and Mohammad soon started supplying windows and doors.

And it was whilst running Empire Glass that Mohammad first came across the Gerda front door, which Pioneer Trading Company’s managing director Danny Williams had recently brought across to the UK from Poland back in 2023.

Mohammad is said to have quickly become one of Pioneer’s top sellers of the Gerda door.

“My client base was becoming more demanding in their expectations around performance, safety and added value, and my existing door supplier just wasn’t delivering that level of quality that we wanted to sell,” said Mohammad.

“Even though the Gerda doors were coming in at a slightly more expensive rate, my customers were loving them – the aesthetics, the enhanced security features, the lower U-values – and definitely the ‘thunk’.”

But more than that, the Gerda door appealed to Mohammad’s core customer base – a demographic looking for premium decorative glazing products at the higher end of the market.

According to Mohammad, this realisation came at a time when he and his brother were keen to concentrate their business on this more niche sector, leading to the decision to sell Empire of Glass as a going concern, and open a brand new business venture – UK Glaze.

“We reinvested everything we had in setting up this new unit,” continued Mohammad. “The glass factory has every piece of kit we need to cut, process and transport the glass. And the showroom is evolving into a living, breathing example of what we can offer through our glass cutting services – from staircases and wall panels to bespoke furniture. The Gerda door sits proudly in the showroom as a focal point.”

The support Mohammad has received from Gerda has been instrumental in the transition out of central London to Royston, and Mohammad is consistently grateful for (and surprised by) the level of personal service he receives from Gerda.

“There are always going to be issues with suppliers no matter how brilliant they are, but it is by the quality of the response that we judge them,” continued Mohammad. “With previous door suppliers we have had problems on site which had evolved into weeks of going round in circles and leaving jobs half finished.

“On the rare occasion we have had an issue with a Gerda door, all it took was a phone call to Keith Arm (Gerda’s sales manager), and the missing piece was in a taxi en route to the installation site. It is for this reason that we feel completely confident in Gerda’s commitment to partnering with us in building UK Glaze into a premium supplier to high end homes.”

“Gerda’s values always align with quality above all else, and when it meets an installation business with similar values everything just seems to slot into place – just as it did with UK Glaze,” added Pioneer’s managing director, Danny Williams. “Mohammad is starting this new venture at the most challenging time economically, but in truth it is probably the best time in terms of building growth in the coming weeks and months.

“Pioneer values are based on a deep seated commitment to those who work hard, and we will be there to support Mohammad at every stage.”