Bradley Gaunt, Managing Director, Made For Trade
First Job: Manufacturing engineer for an inline filter company.
When did you join or set up current company: 2005
Most useful/favourite gadget: Dyson DC58 hand held vacuum! Amazing at quickly sucking up those bits of food and crumbs from under the kitchen table after my 2- and 3-year olds have finished their dinner.
Favourite/most useful website: Sky News. I like to keep up with world current affairs.
Business person you admire: Richard Branson.
Recommended hotel for business: Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester. As the name suggests it is situated in an old abbey and has most of its original features. Lovely surroundings and decent food too.
Favourite UK restaurant: This is a difficult question. My favourite restaurant would have to be the Fat Duck in Bray. Other than that though, I’d have to say the one I frequent the most often because it has decent food and GREAT beer would be the Golden Lion in Osmotherly, North Yorkshire.
Best business decision: Perhaps too early to say that it was deciding on developing the new Korniche roof Lantern but I very much hope it is! If not that, then it would certainly be the decision to stop fabricating windows and doors back in 2006 to allow us to start growing our roof kit and further on, the bi-folding parts to my business.
Other interests: I mountain bike up in the local hills most weekends and enjoy getting away with the lads snowboarding each year.
Working Day: I arrive at work between 7.30 and 8.00 each day. Monday mornings are set aside for analysing KPI data from accounts and sales. I feel it is vitally important to know and understand how my business is performing. For the last 18 months we have been developing our new slim line aluminum roof lantern and so a great deal of the rest of my day has been absorbed by this. Attention to detail is key and although I have had a more than capable team dedicated to this, it still needs conducting. I started out of university as an engineer and so improving and innovating are in my blood.
Working Location: With having multiple sites I can’t be everywhere at once but simply from a historic point of view before we took on the other places, I have my office in our roof kit factory. I like to hear what is going on around me in the other offices and so I have to I have fitted a set of bi-folding doors between my office and the roof processing department. This way I get to hear what goes on day to day but can also shut my doors and have a private meeting if needs be.
It’s been a tremendous few years for us here at Made For Trade, having seen unprecedented growth and the expansion of the business that has exceeded our expectations. The demand for our core products, the Visofold aluminium bi-folding door and Global conservatory roof, continues to be strong and has increased year on year, giving us the basis on which we want to expand our horizons. 2016 has been a turning point for us with the release of our Korniche roof lantern. We wanted to expand on the two well-established products we already supplied and decided we wanted to create a fully thermally isolated aluminum roof lantern. I felt this product fitted in perfectly with our roof kit and bi-folding door fabrication knowledge and after looking at the current lantern market, we decided we could develop something better in terms of strength, aesthetics and also less fiddly to fit to allow for a vastly reduced time on site for the installer.
Fruits of our labours
With my background in engineering and the expertise of my brother Ashley, who works as an automotive engineer in Italy, we teamed up and spent 18 months in the design and development process with the aim of bringing a brand new product to the market. Earlier this year, we were finally able to reveal the fruits of our labour at the FIT show – the slim-line Korniche aluminium roof lantern. The innovative Korniche roof lantern – incredibly quick and easy to install, the Korniche only requires a single hex key to assemble (not including screwing the eaves beam down) and has no need for the fitter to use any silicone sealant. It is thermally broken with slim-line sections and hidden fixings, giving you a contemporary and aesthetically pleasing roof. The roof lanterns currently available have been designed to utilise existing parts from other systems. Ultimately, by having a blank canvas we haven’t been restricted to using parts that might not be ideally suited to the job and therefore, we have ended up with a product where each part has been designed to work perfectly with the next. Our first FIT Show – we made the decision to unveil the Korniche at the FIT Show in April to ensure it would get the exposure it deserved – after all, there is no place better than the biggest event in the industry’s calendar. It was our first time at the show as exhibitors and we didn’t really know what to expect. However, it absolutely surpassed our expectations. Our stand was bustling throughout the three days and we had some excellent feedback, with several people saying they wanted to replace their current lantern in their own homes with the Korniche! We couldn’t have asked for better feedback than that.
Bigger and better
After this success, it only seemed right for us to book our place at next year’s FIT Show at the Birmingham NEC – we will have a larger stand and are currently exploring options on how to make the 2017 Made For Trade exhibit bigger and better. One thing the FIT Show has taught us is that the industry is certainly not struggling for ideas –constant investment and innovations are giving a new lease of life to the market by offering new and different options to both the consumer and to businesses. Usually, with anything that is new and niche, there are healthier margins to be earned and perhaps this is essential for the longevity of many businesses in our sector. The history of Made For Trade – after graduating from the University of Nottingham with an engineering degree, I worked for a company that manufactures compressor filters and oil/air separators. After two years, I was looking to expand my horizons and really felt as though instead of concentrating on a small element of the overall whole, I was wanting to look at a bigger picture. My father, Richard, owned Aanco UK – a long-serving domestic PVC-U installation business in the North East and the offer was made for me to come on board, take the reins and try something new. In March 2006, we decided to expand our conservatory roof kits into the trade market – I felt we had the facilities and the experience to make more than the 3-4 we had been fabricating for our own domestic use up to that point. Made For Trade was coined as the name of our trade supply arm and over the next 5 years we expanded our roof kit business almost exponentially and took on more staff to accommodate the growth. It was then that we decided to look at adding another product that was up and coming in the marketplace at the time and after some negotiating, we settled on the Smarts Aluminium Visofold 1000 bi-folding door as that next step. The bi-folds department has subsequently seen non-stop and significant demand, with two new factories and an increase in employees serving this side of the business in 2014-2015.
Sticking to values
Made For Trade’s values – when we were looking to add the Korniche roof lantern to our portfolio, we were conscious we should stick to the values that have helped us grow into the company we are today, providing the best quality products at an unbeatable price, teamed with exceptional customer service. We aim to continue this with the Korniche, giving our clients and homeowners a premium aluminium product with an attractive price tag. I firmly believe what we have achieved is unique and although the Korniche’s journey has been a long one, I am incredibly excited about manufacturing our very own product that we have created from scratch. It’s an incredible milestone for Made For Trade and gives us an extra edge as a supplier. We really hope the Korniche will be as well-received as it was at the FIT Show and we are looking forward to supplying this exceptional product. The Korniche roof lantern is due to go into production in late-June. For more information about Made For Trade or the Korniche, visit www.madefortrade.co or call 01642 610799.
