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Achieve your design visions with aluminium bifold doors  

AluFoldDirect fits out new showroom at Just Value Doors

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AluFoldDirect teams up with Italian designers to deliver £2.4m refurbishment for Krones Group

Aluminium Bi-fold Doors for Home Refurbishments

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Gets our vote!

AluFoldDirect teams with GlassRooms Architectural Glazing Limited to create bespoke £40k glass extension in Cheshire 

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“Using innovative bending machine technology, the clever workers at AluFoldDirect shape lengths of aluminium into arches and circles. For the triangles, straight pieces of aluminium are fixed together by workers called fabricators.

“The shaped windows can then be fitted with glass and delivered to the house where they will be installed.

“Some window fitters like to buy the glass themselves but other fitters like to have the windows delivered with the glass ready to fit. AluFoldDirect delivers windows installers, with or without glass, just two weeks after ordering.

“Making shaped windows is a very special process and AluFoldDirect have spent a lot of money on the clever machine that does the bending.

“Today children, we’re going to go through the arched window to see how AluFoldDirect is making shaped aluminium windows,” say Aluminium Shapes Play School Presenters, Al and Lu.

How developers can benefit from our dedicated Aluminium Glazing Project team

If you’re taking on a domestic or commercial, new-build construction or larger-scale refurbishment job, bring certainty to your project by dealing directly with the fabricator.

Designed for developers like you, our dedicated Aluminium Glazing Projects Service provides essential project management services, offering design support, with right-first-time aluminium glazing that’s delivered on-time and in budget.

Essential support from your dedicated Aluminium Glazing Project team

By working directly alongside installers, architects, designers, specifiers and developers over the years, we have come to understand the ins and outs of delivering glazing projects along with challenges you may face.

Our Aluminium Glazing Projects service has been developed to offer you dedicated project management to guarantee the delivery of your latest aluminium glazing job.

From design, right through to completion, the Projects team are available to provide expert advice, along with essential support to ensure that your project runs as smoothly as possible.

You will have one single point of contact in the Projects team, who will support you every step of the way, from initial discussion and job specific design specification, to individual itemised products being delivered on a site specific, achievable delivery strategy.

The Projects team work directly with our fabrication team, ensuring that any unique requirements for your project are met and to eliminate any mis-measures or mis-fit errors.

When your aluminium glazing project reaches the installation stage, we co-ordinate a planned delivery strategy to ensure all products arrive on time, right-first time, every time. With on-site experience, our Projects team can identify any installation skills gaps and offer hands-on training for sub-contractors and installers at our Aluminium Glazing Installation Academy.

We have a full range of aluminium glazing solutions to assist with a variety of building projects of any size and complexity.

Suited to domestic and commercial applications, for refurbishments, renovations and new-builds, the Everything Aluminium range features bifolding doors, sliding doors, roof lanterns, flat roof lightsand slimline windows.

Everything Aluminium is manufactured in our state-of-the-art factory in Blackburn, using high quality, high performance slimline profiles, in only 1 week for unglazed units and 2 weeks for glazed. We always deliver in a non-branded van directly to site, across the UK.

Visit our Everything Aluminium range in person

You can see our Everything Aluminium range at the AluFoldDirect Aluminium Glazing Design Centrelocated at our HQ in Blackburn – it’s the only dedicated aluminium glazing showroom outside of London!

We have full-sized displays of our windows, doors and latest innovations, making it ideal to see how our aluminium glazing looks, get a feel for the product and understand how it functions in person. It’s a great place to come and meet the Aluminium Glazing Projects team, discuss the requirements for your project and get advice and guidance on the best products for the job.

A selection of our Aluminium Glazing Projects

If you’re wondering if we can help with your next project, see what can be achieved with help from our Aluminium Glazing Projects team! Our Projects team have worked with customers on some amazing developments, including new-build homes and office block refurbishments.

We teamed with Italian designers Brown & Bancroft Interiors to deliver this £2.4m refurbishment project for Krones Group. Our slimline aluminium window units were used to add light and space throughout the property.

From office-block to luxury apartments, Bridgewater House was transformed in this multi-million-pound canal-side development near Manchester. We supplied our aluminium glazing to create 60 modern flats.

If you have a project that would benefit from our dedicated Aluminium Glazing Projects Service, or you would like to find out more information, get in touch with us! You can call us on 01706 260700, email 

, complete our online form, or if you are in the local area, drop by our Aluminium Glazing Design Centre for a cuppa!

Clearly then, if we all think we’re busy already, we’ve really seen nothing yet. Up until now, it’s been fairly easy for suppliers who are struggling to cope with demand to argue that no one could have predicted the current market and, to an extent, that’s true. But, more than a year since the end of the first lockdown, those excuses are wearing a bit thin.

Certainly, this is the point at which installation businesses need to look at how well their suppliers have been able to secure their supply chain up until now; and make careful judgments about whether that feels robust enough to withstand what we all know is on its way.

The aluminium sector has arguably weathered the storm much more successfully than PVC-U, and certainly lead times for aluminium are shorter now than they are for PVC-U for probably the first time ever. That’s not just down to luck though – it’s been about the right decisions being made at the right time – by both systems houses and fabricators.

As we look ahead at what is still to come and hear from builders and installers who have full order books well into 2022, I think we could potentially see a tsunami of orders in the third and particularly the fourth quarter of this year. If that is the case, then it will be the suppliers who had the financial strength and the confidence to invest during the worst of the crisis in 2020 who will best be able to cope.

When I joined AluFold Direct from AluK in May 2020, our priority wasn’t to batten down the hatches as some of our competitors were doing, or even just to try and keep up with the demand which greeted us on the reopening from the first lockdown, but to put in place the measures required to really ramp up our output well beyond that. We’ve got big plans to grow as a business and to take our customers with us on that journey, and we were already planning on opening the additional factory here in Blackburn which will now come on stream in September.

However, we also had the foresight, the buying power and, above all the strong relationships required to secure guaranteed volumes of components from our key suppliers in aluminium, hardware, consumables and crucially glass for the whole of 2021. And we are now seeing that proactive approach pay off.

For instance, we were already dual sourcing on glass, but we took the decision last December to switch from one of those suppliers to a more reliable alternative, while still splitting our sourcing between Saint Gobain and Pilkingtons. Even for the biggest hitters, there’s obviously only so much volume of stock to go around, particularly in glass, so allocations have to be made but, for any fabricators who haven’t already secured their allocations for the rest of this year, I would say that it’s probably too late.

I’ve heard plenty of people from right across the industry saying that they are so busy at the moment that there’s just no breathing space and no opportunity to take stock and do what’s necessary to increase capacity and reduce lead times. My advice to installers then is not to choose a fabricator who is playing catch up with the market, but to choose one that’s already ahead of the game.

The Bank of England has just raised its estimate for UK GDP growth in 2021 to 7.25% - up from the 5% it forecast in February. Further easing of restrictions, it says, will pave the way for a boom in pent-up demand.

Alongside that, construction industry data from the Purchasing Managers’ Index shows that orders in the construction market are already increasing at the fastest rate since it started reporting the figures in 1997.

For customers though, despite the vast amount of change which is actually taking place, it will largely have felt like business as usual so far – with the same consistently fast and reliable service and the same reassuring guarantee of any product, in any colour, delivered anywhere in the UK.

Now however, some of the first innovations that Russell and the team are introducing are being rolled out to customers, and there is a growing sense of excitement about how these will help companies who choose AluFold Direct as their supply partner achieve really meaningful growth.

There is a new brand and a new website to help communicate the scale of the transformation happening and a game changing new online ‘quick quote’ tool on the website designed to make the AluFold Direct service even smarter and more user friendly.

 enables customers to get an instant trade price for nearly every product in the AluFold Direct range – from windows, entrance doors and bi-folds to lanterns, sliders, rooflights and commercial doors.

All that users need to do is enter in their sizes, select glazed or unglazed and standard or non-standard colours and the tool will calculate the price and send it instantly by email. There’s a step-by-step guide included which walks users through the quote builder tool, a handy guide to help them choose the right spec for each project and a survey template to make sure they don’t miss anything.

Russell Yates explained: “We’re taking all the hassle out of quote building for our customers. They can get an instant price straight to their inbox and log in as many times as they like to change the spec whenever suits them. Obviously, if they need a more detailed quote on a particularly large project, they can simply upload their own survey files and one of our team will get straight back to them.”

The tool sits on the trade section of the new website. Retail buyers who visit the site are directed to a dedicated ‘Find An Installer’ section and prompted to enter their details to help generate additional leads for AluFold Direct customers.

Russell added: “This is a more capable and comprehensive tool than anything else out there for quoting in aluminium at the moment and hopefully serves as a powerful statement of intent in terms of how we will be approaching the market in 2021 and beyond. We have huge ambitions for this business and part of that will come from providing customers with a really useful and valuable set of support tools, which will help them make the most of the opportunities available in aluminium while making their lives as easy as possible.”

AluFold Direct is set to reveal more of its plans over the coming weeks and months, including a new cloud-based customer pricing portal and some radical product developments and sustainability initiatives.

A lot has been happening behind the scenes at AluFold Direct since last May, when Russell Yates was appointed Managing Director. Much of that has been focused around driving operational efficiencies, expanding the team, and investing and equipping a new factory which is set to open soon

 projects, for which we supplied our signature 

 at the Homebuilding & Renovating Awards.

Here's what Colin Price, Director at James Price Group, had to say about working with AluFold Direct:

Thanks to Alufold’s manufacturing quality and time frame we were able to fulfil the homeowner and clients needs successfully.

You can read all about the exquisite project 

 and also, most importantly make sure you vote for it 

We were over the moon when our customer, the 

 got in touch with some very exciting news!

We launched our new look this month and we’re using the 

 as part of our campaign to build awareness not just of the new logo but of what it stands for in the market.

For Managing Director Russell Yates, it’s about showing both existing and potential customers that AluFold Direct is a company undergoing an exciting transformation. We have big ambitions to change the way aluminium windows and doors are supplied into the trade market and we want to show existing and potential customers how that could benefit them directly.

A new factory, new processes and smart new service initiatives are designed to make buying aluminium windows and doors as simple as buying PVC-U, giving installers a great opportunity to build their businesses in partnership with AluFold Direct.