Hi Jinky,
I thought I would take the time to answer this question, as I am stuck at home on this sunday morning with sick kids and my wife has gone out with the only well child!
Yes they would be cheaper if they were sold at B&Q, off the shelf,......but they would only do this if they could guarantee sales of 40-50,000 of each size of unit per year. I recently was in communication with one of B&Q suppliers and they would only consider a bespoke item being supplied if I was prepared to commit to 50,000 units being bought at a time!
The truth about this window cleaning market is that whilst it is relatively large by our standards it is actually very small compared to other markets. As a result any items that we suppliers have commisioned cost us a relatively high set-up cost and this has to be passed on to the customer.
We set up our firm as a natural progression of supplying certain parts that other firms didn't stock, we then decided to try and supply good value products one of these being poles.
Over the last 5 years we had worked out which poles we found worked the best, and decided to start supplying them. The poles we supply have to be bought at a minimum order value of about £20,000 at a time, we have just finalised supplying another carbon-fibre pole and for this we will have to make an investment of about £30,000. Ionics reportedly spent over £100,000 in just set-up costs for their ergo-lite poles.
The suppliers available for these products are limited and there is not a large degree of competition amongst the manufacturers. In fact due to tough market conditions there is a lot of consolidation amongst the firms, Exel the main supplier has just bought out the one competitor in the UK. Hence those of us that wish to have them made for us have a very limited range of suppliers.
The other problem is due to rising commodity prices. The growing Chinese industry is proving problematical for most other consuming nations, for instance due to the Chinese demand for Carbon Fibre the current prices for Carbon Fibre are going up by 15% a month and has been for the last few months, this presents a difficult situation for suppliers to provide accurate future price forecasts, on one product we were looking at recently it went up by 35% in just 3 months.
This is the problems faced by us WC suppliers, looking round at the market there is actually quite a good choice out there for window cleaners, whilst this can make it difficult to decide what to buy it does mean that you do have a choice which is what a free market is all about.
If B&Q did sell poles they would be so competitive that, in such a small market, they would probably be the only supplier and you would only be able to purchase the type of poles they decided to sell you. Where's the benefit to us Window cleaners in that.
On a side point I think you will find that the pole weight for the Brodex is just for the pole not the gooseneck, hose and brush.
Alex Gardiner
