HEAVYSIDE T
he black art of brick matching is made much more simple if you can match brick sizes as well as textures and shades. Especially if you can come up with a product that will look like it has been there for a hundred years, but still has all the quality assurance of a brand new product. “That’s the idea behind what we can offer the market,” says Jason Hughes managing director of Imperial Bricks.
The company started off as reclamation specialists, with Hughes trekking round demolition sites in the UK, whether that be office blocks, factories or farm buildings, and taking the bricks, slates and cobblestones of the demolition contractor and selling them back into the reclamation market and builders merchants. “In doing this all the way round the UK you start to understand the rationality of the market and how it changes as you travel,” he says. “So, for example, in London you will see a lot of the old London stocks, the soft reds, but when you move down to the south coast you see different bricks. The east coast has a lot of these chalky style bricks, the north has different colours and more engineering type bricks. “Pre 1965 all bricks were imperial sized,” he points out. “This means that whenever we took a reclaimed brick off a site we managed to sell it, because someone was using it to extend their property and wanted a match. However, there were real issues with poor quality of bricks getting to the market, limited availability, no guarantees so we honed in on the idea that we could make bricks in a traditional way to match brickwork all around the UK. We started out with a range of eight or nine of the most common bricks required, and that has grown to perhaps 50 or 60.”
Imperial offer bricks which are traditionally made in a fresh-out-of-the kiln way and also offer reclamation finishes which allows someone to really match not just the size and style of the brick, but also the weathered appearance. They can also be bespoke coloured to a particular shade or colour in order to match existing brickwork.
Despite the name, Imperial’s bricks aren’t just imperial sizes, either, Hughes points out. “We realised that we were being asked more and more for metric-sized bricks. That’s hardly surprising, since it’s been 50 years since metrification first started to take hold in brick making, so, as time goes on, there are more and more houses built with metric bricks that will need matching. That said, much of our custom for our metric sizes comes from developers who are building in conservation areas and are looking for something that satisfies the planning requirements and matches in with the surrounding area” The company’s key benefit for builder’s merchants, Hughes says, is that they are offering reclamation finishes in both imperial and metric sizes. “No-one else is doing this and it gives merchants a revenue stream that wasn’t
22 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BRICK
Fiona Russell Horne meets a brick company mixing the best of the old with the best of the new.
there before. It’s also a revenue stream that, we believe, offers them good margin opportunity.” Imperial works with a number of partner factories, depending on the clay types they have available and the capacity that can be offered. “For example, in London you need base yellow clay, for the south east you need a soft sandy clay. So we will generally go where the clay types are that will allow us to make the bricks traditionally. Our target customer isn’t the architect, it’s the builder’s merchant.”
Traditional ranges
Hughes says that the company has around 50 to 60 bricks in the range which covers a traditional core range and regional standard finishes. “We also then have some ancillary ranges. If a merchant tells us that they are struggling with supply for contemporary white, or grey linear or waterstruck bricks, for example, then we have arrangements with the factories that means we can help them out. “Our specification team goes out to do RIBA approved CPD presentations to architects and we try to follow up queries and back sell specifications through the merchants. One of the things our salesmen out on the road will say to merchants is that if they get an enquiry for something that’s a bit different to let us deal with the enquiry. We will see if we can find a bespoke blend that will suit the customer and then pass it back to the merchant to deal with the sale. It opens up the market and means enquiries can translate into actual business for the merchant.”
There is also the new Brick Matcher App, introduced at the end of last year. This is a fully interactive tool to help, merchants, developers
architects and self-builders identify the right brick for their projects. It includes functions such as searching for a brick by name, colour, texture, size or geographical location as well as the option to upload a picture of existing brickwork for a quick brick match. The built-in brick calculator be used to work out quantities and it allows customers to quickly source and compare bricks, as well as request samples, brochures or a site visit and easily register sites online.
“Our message to merchants is that by talking to us, they may be able to gain business that they might otherwise miss, simply because they can’t get supply of a product which will match a client’s exiting brickwork. At Imperial we have the scope and the flexibility to find those products because we have the relationships with our partner factories that means we can offer products that suit such a wide range of regional brick styles. We won’t ever be able to compete with the big volume business of the major players, but that isn’t what we are about. What we do is offer builders merchants product in styles and sizes that they might not get elsewhere, at a price that makes good sense for their bottom line and our own.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net March 2019
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