PART THREE | The final instalment in our profile of Graham Burdett of Cromer Carpets in Norfolk
GRAHAM Burdett, as we’ve seen, has been in flooring man and boy. And even though he’s 68, he’s shown no interest in retiring from his company in Norfolk, Cromer Carpets.
But while we noted Graham’s experience of business in the first part of this story, he has a real problem with one part of the trade – waste. And try as he might, he’s meeting dead ends when trying to find a solution.
The problem is very simple. When Burdett fits wet-room safety floors, he’s having to order far more material than he needs, with a sizeable chunk being discarded.
Why? Because as he outlines, most wet-rooms are more than 2m wide. The problem is the material – the flooring – is 2m in width and that’s not enough.
Says Burdett: ‘Only one in 100 wet-rooms, I’d say roughly, in north Norfolk, is under 1.8m wide. Most of them are 2, 2.2 by 2.7m or maybe two and a half by 3m.’
He continues: ‘When you go to see these lovely people, who’ve spent quite a few thousand pounds having a wet room created – and they’re quite well to do – they really don’t like it when I explain the flooring has to have a welded seam in it which will be a slightly different colour and different texture.’
Burdett gives an example: ‘If I’ve got a room at 2.75 by 2m, I’ve got to order a 3m section to do the curls at either end and order another 3m bit. I’m wasting over a third of it, just chucking it away because the customer wants one joint in a straight line.’
He adds a contrasting situation – a hotel with a kitchen where customers don’t care about the joints – ‘if you have a pub, you’ll know all about the joints behind the bar.’ However, he says that the average person in the street who’s never seen joints before would be irritated.
And with regard to a hotel kitchen, for which Burdett uses an easy example of a room that measures 8x8m, he’d get vinyl in lengths of 8.5m so it curls at either end. ‘You do two runs of two x 8.5m. You lay it out, fold it back on the top, put glue down, then lay the vinyl into the glue. Then you fold the other half back and put that in the glue.’
So, as he tells, the widest width he can work with in a hotel kitchen is 2m – the ideal width. ‘All the manufacturers’ machines are 2m wide. And it’s ideal – 2m is perfect. But they make the same stuff for bathrooms on the same machines as for the hotel kitchens and behind bars in pubs… they have never had a two and half metre or three metre machine … and I’m absolutely certain it could be done.’
But if manufacturers became more flexible in their offerings – say they gave him a range of widths, they’d win his business forever. As he says, ‘if any manufacturer offers me a range that comes in two, two and a half or three metre widths, I wouldn’t show other rival products – I’d leave them on the van. I’d go to customers and say, ‘this is a multi-width range, this is a set of colours you can have, and you won’t have a joint’.’ He’s certain they’d pick from that range without real regard for colour as they only ever choose a neutral colour which matches the tiles and suchlike.
The amount of wastage created by Burdett would diminish and he could then lay flooring in one piece, saving an hour’s fitting time, the need to weld a joint, and importantly, the need to explain to customers why they must have an unsightly joint.
Burdett isn’t bothered if the manufacturers charged more for these wider sections: ‘They could charge more for it because I’m not wasting any. They might sell a standard roll at one price, but they might charge 25% more for the two and a half or three-metre-wide roll.’
And he says this because the price of the flooring isn’t price critical – ‘when the floor is the last thing to go down’. He adds that his charges for a typical wet-room are between £500-750.
And the bonus for the manufacturers, as he sees it, would be first mover brand loyalty – ‘even if others caught up and provided wider rolls, I would still prefer the original manufacturer because they had helped me.’
It really grates on Burdett that he’s totally failed to get his message over to manufacturers. As he outlines, they seem to live in a gated world ‘I can’t get in to.’ He adds: ‘I speak to the reps and they say they’ll pass the message up. I go to the trade shows and speak to staff, but even there I don’t really meet anybody at the top. I don’t ever get to meet decision-making people, and I’d love to have a conversation about this with them.’
Thankfully Burdett’s not lost business because of this situation saying, ‘we always get the job, we don’t lose any business, and we charge for the waste material’.
But what really irks Burdett is this problem is unique to this type of wet-room flooring as ‘everything else comes multi-width’.
He details in other areas that ‘some manufacturers offer widths of 1m, 12-foot Westex, 4m, 15 foot, and 5m. They do five different widths. Then there’s the old-fashioned Imperial widths and the modern metric width… there’s various cut down widths in the carpet. And vinyls come two, three, and four and there’s one book with 5m which is handy sometimes.’
It’s no stretch of the imagination to realise Burdett is keen on being sustainable and is taking steps to do better by the planet. Cutting out flooring wastage is one change, but in other areas he says ‘we’re doing as much as we can. We send the poles back that carpets come on. And the foam has gone from the back of carpets’.
Sadly, he reports there’s little that can be done with used carpet – ‘when they’ve been down 10 or 20 years, in even a beautifully clean, lovely house, it’s still dirty. We have to bin it’.
Cromer Carpets doesn’t presently operate any electric vehicles, but Burdett says ‘the next one might be – we’ve got a 4,000sq ft south facing flat roof and we’re going to have solar panels on the roof with electric charging points, so the solar panels will charge up a van’.
Ultimately
Burdett is hoping his waste story might get a response from manufacturers. As he reiterates, ‘if they made it wider, we’d order less material and there’d be less waste, and we’d be greener. That’s the one, two, three of customer satisfaction and it would be easier for me to sell’.
www.cromercarpets.com