Further expansion for DoorCo Thorne

By Mark Towers, strategy director, DoorCo.

Since the purchase of our Thorne facility in Doncaster in 2023, we have been working towards utilising the 3.2 acre site to build a hub for innovation, manufacturing and storage to support our manufacturing home in Macclesfield.

Those plans are now coming to fruition ready for 2026, as the transition to a new goods-in storage facility that houses both composite doors from Korea, Indonesia and Flip cassettes, is now complete.

Doncaster provides DoorCo with the opportunity to expand UK operations and gain greater control over the future of our business. As part our ongoing positive drive for in-house efficiency across our internal processes and procedures, we’ve been focused on incorporating the extra 80,000ft2 of space Doncaster provides fully into our business operations.

Doncaster started out as the home of BritDor – our solid door offering available in 44mm and 48mm options – to support our drive to bring more of our product manufacturing into the UK. This was followed by installing an automated volume staining solution that meets the quality demands of our customers by delivering a more consistent colour match across our range of door designs, including Flip cassettes.

We then turned our attention to the foaming lines for Flip, an investment which has allowed us to grow our cassette sales, resulting in over 750,000 cassettes sold this year, making Flip the market-leading door glazing cassette system. The size and scale of Doncaster has not only enabled us to expand the space we have to pre-foam Flip, but it has also allowed us to introduce a second shift for higher production levels.

Storage space for more doors

The final piece in the puzzle, following the last of our incumbent tenants vacating their units, was to invest in a new goods inward holding facility for the doors, from where we are picking and loading doors and shipping them to DoorCo Macclesfield to ensure stocks are regularly replenished. We have also converted one of the other buildings, installing 700+ racking locations to hold all our Flip cassette stock.

For customers, these changes will only improve our service. The project is about expanding the support service operations for Macclesfield, ensuring we can keep higher volumes of stock here in the UK to make supply more fluid and enhance our quality control. The new facilities are being managed by a growing team, like Chris Shooten, Doncaster’s warehouse manager who is overseeing both the transition and long-term supply support for the Macclesfield facilities.

Ryan Rafferty, who was promoted to the manufacturing manager role, will be focused on monitoring and growing the volumes of BritDor, Flip and stained doors, whilst continuing to ensure quality and safety are paramount on site.

Home of innovation

While we have been busy renovating the space and working on this project, we’ve kept our focus on building the Innovation Hub too and we’re working on the next generation of composite door for the UK market.

We’re excited to kick start 2026 in a strong position, founded on planned capacity across the business, that gives our customers the very best that DoorCo has to offer.