Choosing the Right Brick Suppliers for Commercial Projects
When deciding on your construction project designs and materials, the process can become very complicated and overwhelming quickly. You’ll be faced with various tricky decisions to make regarding your building materials.
If you’ve decided that using bricks is the way forward for your commercial project, we’d be the first to tell you that you’ve made the right decision. Building with bricks has become increasingly common, not least because bricks have so many practical and aesthetic advantages. But without the help of a trusted, reliable brick supplier, how are you going to know which type of brick to choose?
If you’re not a specialist when it comes to choosing the right bricks, you may end up making a mistake on the brick type, which could prove costly and damaging. Therefore, it only makes sense to seek the help of brick suppliers who understand the market and can help you along the way. We’ve put together a short guide that will help you decide on the best brick supplier.
What Do Brick Suppliers Do?
Brick suppliers are responsible for supplying clay products and materials to private, residential and commercial contractors, developers, builders, and architects. In addition, they act as the point of contact and liaison between the architect(s), designer(s), brick manufacturers and factories.
Brick suppliers work in tandem with brick factories and manufacturers to source an ideal product that complements the architect’s vision. They are responsible for finding a perfect brick product with the ideal balance between practicality, structural integrity and aesthetic appeal (colour, texture, size, dimensions, etc.) For any project, brick suppliers should also take surrounding brickwork, available materials, bonding patterns, and mortar colours alongside the brick itself, which ultimately may mean conversing with multiple brick manufacturers.
Modular Clay Products are a leading supplier of various brick types – such as glazed bricks, brick slips, cladding panels and long format bricks – but explicitly for the commercial sector.
How to Choose a Brick Supplier
Understanding what brick suppliers do is important, but how can you tell which product to use for your next project?
First and foremost, you should identify the best brick to use. You should also factor in the brick bonding pattern you want for your building, colour, texture, mortar and so on.
It goes without saying that your brick choices should take priority so that by the time you begin looking for brick suppliers, you have a solid idea of the brick colour, texture and style you’d like. Ideally, you should be able to visualise how your building will look.
From then, your brick suppliers can begin sourcing samples and mockups.
You should look for the following in your brick suppliers:
Versatile project history
What buildings have your suppliers worked on? This is a good indicator of the scale of their common projects and the materials they work with. You can find all of Modular Clay Products’ commercial case studies here.
Diverse product range
Do you know the difference between facing bricks and engineering bricks? What about handmade bricks and machine-made bricks? Would you be able to tell the difference? Also, could you visualise your building in standard UK brick sizes in a stretcher bond pattern, as well as a Roman brick size in a herringbone pattern?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, chances are your brick supplier has access to brick products you don’t even know about. Not just that, but they’d be able to source bricks in different textures, sizes and colours, which you can find out more about below.
Positive online reviews
What have the brick suppliers’ customers said about them? If you find positive reviews, this can be a good indicator, but also, if there have been any negative comments, how the supplier responds and handles the query can be equally important.
Partnerships
You can tell a lot about a brick supplier by looking at their partners – not just brick manufacturers and factories but also architects and designers. Here is a page of all Modular Clay Products’ partners.
Brick Selector
Following on from the brick ranges point above, at Modular Clay Products, we have an excellent brick finder tool that lets you find specific bricks out of the thousands on our site. The brick selector has various fields you can fill in, and when you press “find bricks”, it will bring up all our available options in one page for you. Read more here.