Aluminium doors and windows in KAV quality, at an affordable price

With the KAV Home product range, our company is making high-quality aluminium doors and windows available to a new customer base. We talked to Zoltán Balázsi, sales engineer, and Károly Lovász, the Executive Director of KAV, about why this opening is important in the life of KAV and why it is worth buying aluminium doors and windows at KAV.

How is KAV Home different from what has been typical of the company so far?

Zoltán Balázsi: Basically, KAV represents a premium category in terms of materials, design and mindset. It offers a service that others cannot offer in the domestic window and door market. But now we’re also opening up to a new customer base. The aim is to provide windows and doors with a base technical content that don’t need ongoing, expensive maintenance (e.g. no painting or replacement after a few years), but are of long-term value and you can rely on to work. Aluminium doors and windows are a good choice for any family home precisely because they hold their value. In KAV’s premium service, specialised planning and the amount of engineering hours require a lot of time, money and effort on the part of the client, too. They’re needed to create a fully customised solution. This won’t be necessary in KAV Home, which makes aluminium windows available to a wider range of customers due to its lower prices. They can provide a solution for buildings that require one or two types of windows, sliding doors and entrance doors. In terms of technical content, these aluminium window and door elements don’t fall short of the quality you’re used to from KAV. They’re produced using the same machines, production lines and techniques, but without the need for one-off design and solutions. They don’t have the additional services that make an exclusive house ‘KAV’. But KAV Home, of course, has all kinds of windows and doors available, even in sizes that wood and PVC can’t necessarily do, and I can tell you from my experience that they can’t. During installation and assembly, we also follow the schematics typical of KAV: no less screws, foam or vapour barrier tape are used. So everything in KAV Home is based on the same technical principles as in our previous works.

Several companies offer aluminium windows of this type. Why is it worth choosing KAV in this segment?

Z.B.: I’ve been dealing with doors and windows for nearly twenty years. With most window and door dealers, you go into a shop and there are some samples and corner sections on display. Often, they’re trying to sell products using people who have never seen, or have only seen “from a distance”, how to install and deliver a window or entrance door. But for those who come to us, KAV’s own manufacturing capacity will be a guarantee of quality. Most competitors, however, are buying something from somewhere: they are not manufacturing or producing under controlled conditions; they’re selling a finished product that is what it is. If there’s any problem in production, it will be corrected immediately, because we have our own manufacturing capacity. We have much closer cooperation, with dozens of phone and email exchanges and corporate management software instructions between our plant in Kisbér and our office in Budapest on a daily basis. When someone orders from a retailer, there may be a defect in the painting or a hardware problem with the window or door that occurs during shipping or manufacturing, in which case it could take weeks or months for a warranty process to be completed by most door and window dealers. We have our own manufacturing facility and installation team, which not only makes repairs smoother, but also allows us to keep prices lower.

Does that mean that someone can buy a good quality aluminium window at a lower price from KAV, with a complete manufacturing and technical background, so they buy more security?

Z.B.: Exactly. The customer has the backing of a comprehensive product and service unit that they can’t get anywhere else.

Wouldn’t this kind of profile expansion be a risk for a company with a premium customer base?

Károly Lovász: In recent years, KAV has seen a level of capacity expansion that allows for this kind of expansion The exclusive, premium segment, that consistently receives the high level of service they expect from KAV, takes up, say, 65 percent of our manufacturing capacity – and I’m deliberately not giving exact figures – and we can devote the remaining 35 percent to the production of KAV Home products. From an economic point of view, I would say that the aim is to be able to sell the remaining hours of operation that resulted from the expansion of our production capacity. In KAV Home, we’re providing a different service but we can now serve with aluminium windows a segment who previously had access to similar products through a much more uncontrolled route. Here they get a standardised, simple technical solution from premium quality materials. So it’s not that I’m selling something different, it’s not that I’m manufacturing differently, or we’re buying from different parts and different suppliers. We buy from the same main suppliers, Schüco and Reynaers.
We have the same in-factory production control and final quality control on the Home products; our own installation team will install them as well as the other products. This kind of opening will ensure that the 16 people currently working in our plant in Kisbér will be kept busy and will be able to produce during the company’s “idle” hours.

So KAV Home is one of the factors helping the company to grow?

K. L.: Exactly. We have a 3-hectare site now, and we are constantly growing. We also have a serious product development process, and in research and development we want to introduce our own product range. This requires national and international retail experience. It is no secret that we’re also thinking of setting up a retail network, but nowhere near the level we have in our country. Basically, we want to be in contact with engineering teams and engineering offices who can help us with the design, sales, site-building applications and drawing materials for the exclusive product range and new products we’re developing. So we want to find resellers with true added value. But in the meantime, we’re broadening our experience and we’re getting in touch with many more customers and professionals as the market expands. By the way, it is important to note that the Hungarian market works in all aspects in a different way to what we see in Austria, Germany or Iceland.
Unfortunately, a reseller here doesn’t need to know as much about the product as, say, a German reseller. As Zoli mentioned, it is common that a reseller is unable to explain exactly how the production process works, or knows how material procurement and warehousing works. In our company, whoever a contractor talks to, they’ve all worked in the plant as a manual worker and they will talk to people who know what they are doing.
I can’t think of many other window and door sales points in Hungary where so many specialist engineers can communicate with the customer and meet an enquirer face to face with the level of expertise that we do. Here, one will really get an offer from a professional who hasn’t just seen a window two years ago when he first walked into the company for an interview, but who’s been in the industry for a long time. One can even ask us construction questions, during the post-offer personal consultation, that you might not dare or be able to ask elsewhere. We also provide guaranteed professional security and value-assured aluminium windows to our KAV Home customers.