PART ONE | Cromer Carpets founder Graham Burdett has been in flooring since his teens and still works full-time at 68. Some people just don’t stop rolling.
GRAHAM Burdett is the founder and owner of Cromer Carpets in Norfolk. A man aged 68, he may well officially be a pensioner, but he works four days a week estimating and shows no signs of retirement – after more than 50 years in flooring.
Small acorns
He started in the trade by working for Queensway in Norwich, taking on an apprenticeship few years later. The problem was that, as he tells, ‘once I became qualified to lay carpets, I was 19 and couldn’t get a job as I looked too young – they wanted somebody who looked a bit older’.
This knotty problem led him to a job with SGP Carpets in London’s Fulham where he worked on ‘pubs, clubs, hotels, and London Airport’. He stayed there until his mid-20s, before returning to domestic work for Harris Carpets at its Staines, Slough, Windsor, and Queensway, and New Walden branches.
There he remained until 1988, and he was 30, when he decided to return home to Cromer to start his own carpet company he called Buy at Home.
‘I began with a man in a van and did that for that five years before eventually renting various warehouses. I had a slogan, ‘use that phone to carpet your home’. It had a picture of a phone that looked a bit like a house, just a little cartoon character.’
The warehouse business was called ‘Cash and Carry Carpets’ to distinguish it from three rivals in the area.
As he describes it, it was a warehouse ‘full of stock carpets, no pattern books, all stock carpets… from 99p a square yard up to £12.99 a square yard. Walk in, buy it, take it away. But within a short while, my customers from Buy at Home wanted to come in and see pattern books; the idea of running two separate businesses just didn’t work.’
Consequently, he gave up the separate warehouse, which was used for Buy at Home and moved everything into one shop and called it Cromer Carpets. And that’s where he’s been ever since – in a 4,000 square foot site in the town centre near the main car park. He’s been there for nearly 32 years.
And now
A second shop followed 20 years or so ago, and he now has 11 staff plus 15 fitters – all of which are self-employed.
Now he’s out measuring four days a week, ‘which I really enjoy.’ He adds that ‘now I’ve got to 68, I have every Friday off, so I do four-day weeks and the mixture of the three-day weekend and the four-day week works very well for the family, for me, for my wife’.
He says that he’s not ready to retire yet as he enjoys meeting people just to be sociable. ‘Most of them I’ve seen before and sometimes I’m seeing their children or grandchildren on a recommendation.’ Interestingly, Burdett doesn’t see the visits as selling… ‘they’ve already made their mind up when I’ve turned up because they’ve used us before’.
Geographical reach
Given that Norfolk is not densely populated, it’s fair to ask Burdett how wide Cromer Carpet’s reach is.
In response he comments his firm tends to serve an area 15 miles in radius. He adds that ‘Norwich is the big city – 20 miles away and we’re there all the time… but we’ve had jobs in Yarmouth and on the edge of Kings Lynn and even further way’.
He’s also served a customer in London – ‘I went to measure, and the boys went to fit and we were still cheaper’, and that’s even with travelling costs included.
But where jobs are in Norwich or beyond, the fitters – some of whom live that way – take carpet home with them in their vans before going to the job the next day.
www.cromercarpets.com