Ben Wallace, managing director of the Glass & Glazing Federation answers some key questions about October’s Glass Conference, which is being staged in partnership with FENSA and FIT Show.
Q: What first prompted the idea of Glass Conference?
Ben Wallace (BW): The GGF holds more than 100 technical meetings and events every year. In addition to the Members’ Day, every region holds several events as do various technical groups such as home improvement and glazing specialist groups. It is an enormous workload for our staff, as well as being financially demanding of course.
The last two Members Days, our biggest annual events, have been particularly successful, in terms of content but also the quality of presentation and aided by better venues which have resulted in significantly better attendance by GGF members.
The Members Days in Manchester and more recently at Mercedes Benz World in Surrey, brought us many accolades from delegates and also from members of the press and others that attended, comparing the events favourably against other events taking place in the industry. The programmes were complimented for their technical and expert content, presentation quality and expert speakers and especially for their avoidance of commercial bias. Our speakers are always chosen for their knowledge and expertise, not for their commercial value.
Organising the event on a greater scale would enable us to combine many of our regional and technical events and distil them into a single, larger, more effective and impactful conference that would also enable us to include another major element of our industry that is not covered by any conference – installers.
It would also allow us to encourage non-members to come and join us – after all, we are promoting best practice, not just amongst our members, but throughout the industry, so we would raise standards across the board.
And with direct access to FENSA Installers – FENSA is part of the wider GGF Group – we had the opportunity to reach out to the installation side of the industry, one that has been serially ignored by every other event before it.
Q: Why October?
BW: We have excellent relations with FIT Show and have participated heavily with every event they have staged during the past decade or so. And in early, casual conversations it was realised that a partnership would enable them to tap into the expertise that resides within GGF and FENSA, whilst we could enjoy what they do best – organise events.
It would enable us to partner in a larger, wider reaching event that would allow us to promote the many causes and issues that we deal with as a matter of course for every aspect of the glass and glazing industry, without further stretching the resources of our marketing and events department. It was a natural fit of resources.
The venue and date were dictated by opportunity and availability – for events on the scale that we knew we could create, there are surprisingly few UK venues and very little availability. We took what was available in a very tight timeframe, to suit the objectives that we set out for the greater good of the GGF and now, FENSA. Necessarily, we looked at the bigger picture…
Glass Conference allows us to move the game on and achieve our primary objective of communicating and delivering standards and quality throughout the glass and glazing industry and in turn therefore, throughout the markets for such products and services. That is why we have done this. The standard of presentations and speakers and expertise that will appear at Glass Conference on October will be unrivalled. Because that is what the GGF and FENSA is about.
Glass Conference is an opportunity to raise the standards of glass and glazing industry events of this nature to a standard dictated not by how deep the pockets of sponsors might be, but rather, by the expertise and integrity of the presenters, and the desire and need to communicate knowledge and information and best practice to the widest possible audience. We believe that is a worthy cause.
