COMPANY FOCUS: UKO PLC
OPEN UP TO SIMPLE SALES OPPORTUNITIES
Fiona Russell Horne meets a company making it easy for merchants to target the PVC-U window market, and the margins it can bring.
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or eons, builders’ merchants have confidently supplied everything needed to construct a house from the ground up. Almost everything. PVC-U windows and doors have tended to be left to specialist companies who sell direct, either to the builder or to the homeowner. Merchants have, in the past, shied away from the perceived complexity and risk involved in properly servicing this sector. After all, as anyone who watches TV’s Grand Designs knows, it’s the windows and doors where it often goes pear- shaped.
At UKO plc, specialist supplier of aluminium and PVC-U doors and windows, managing director Andrew Glover believes the company has come up with a way round this. The company sells a range of windows and doors to merchants: Ultima UK-made, sustainable, high-performance windows and doors, from casement, tilt & turn and vertical slide windows to aluminium bifold and single, French, patio, composite, and bespoke shape doors, as well as roof lights and roof lanterns. Glover says he understands that if the company wants these products to be
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sold via builders merchants as well as via its own channels, it needs a system which makes it easy. Enter Quad, a streamlined digital platform designed to simplify the process and reduce errors and the fear-factor for merchants.
“The idea behind the portal was to make sure that even someone without much experience, standing in front of a customer asking for fenestration products, has the opportunity to secure that sale,” Glover explains. “That was ultimately where we started.”
Quad is designed to remove the friction from quoting, a process that has historically required, not just a degree of specialist knowledge, but also a tonne of time. “We built the portal to simplify what is actually quite a technically difficult process of getting prices for windows, doors and rooflights,” he says.
While similar tools exist, Glover argues that usability has often been missing. “There’s loads of software and websites out there that do this, but we wanted to make it even more simple, while still allowing enough detail for
a product to be accurately made from the information provided.”
The results have been significant, he says. “You can actually go all the way through and create an order. We’re now seeing something like 75 to 80% of the prices we give to customers being done online rather than manually.”
Whether the merchant’s customer is a sole trader, a window specialist, a self-builder or homeowner, time is always at a premium. “You have to presume that everyone has a busy day,” Glover says. “Not everybody wants to spend their weekends at builders’ merchants, so we asked ourselves how do we make this available online and actually usable? We created the portal so it’s as simple as ticking a box for the options.”
There’s a simple option, which was version one of the portal via the Quad website, but version two can be embedded directly into a merchant’s website, effectively extending their sales capability beyond the trade counter. “We’re trying to ensure that the needs of a whole range of customers can be catered for via the portal or the merchant’s website, so
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2026
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