Gardinia Windows

Ultrafast broadband gives plenty to spare.

Accelerated growth. Happy customers worldwide. Ultrafast broadband is enabling the company’s business – selling and distributing spare parts – to double in size each year. According to Matthew Hill, IT Administrator of Gardinia Windows, “It’s an absolutely essential part of what we do.”

When Gardinia started out in 1983, fax machines were still in their infancy. The Yorkshire firm installed UPVC windows and doors. Then came the Internet. Exploiting its vast catalogue of UPVC spares and strong links with suppliers, Gardinia launched www.upvcspares4repairs.co.uk to sell parts and products online. The business quickly went global.

Whilst Gardinia sells physical products digital is at the heart of how they do it. “We were initially targeting UK companies,” explains Matthew. “But, it turns out, the replacement parts we sell are difficult to source locally, even in places like New Zealand and the US. So we now ship anywhere we can find a courier service.”

This minor Huddersfield miracle depends on ultrafast internet connections to shuttle huge amounts of data to and from the Cloud. Connectivity needs to be as robust and secure as the UPVC that surrounds its windows and doors.

“Our website is in the Cloud but that doesn’t mean the office and warehouse can have a slow or unreliable connection,” says Matthew. “We do two backups of the whole website every day, and we backup our own data to the Cloud each night.”

Then there’s the company promise to dispatch orders the day they’re made. “If our connection was always going down, we’d have no way to process orders and the business would grind to a halt,” he adds. “We upgraded to ultrafast broadband a year ago and it’s not gone down since.”

Gardinia is so confident in our ultrafast broadband that it’s integrating all its physical stock-control into the same one they use online. Once completed, the entire business will be dependent on our optical fibre. Digital transformation. Done and dusted.

Not that Matthew is complacent. Demand for bandwidth is always growing, so what seems plentiful now will likely fall short in the future. “With Virgin Media Business, I don’t have to worry about a lack of bandwidth holding us back,” he says.

Gardinia’s employees needn’t fret about a slow and dodgy internet connection either. Now that ultrafast broadband provides capacity to spare, everyone’s allowed to hook up their tablets and smartphones to the network. And that makes for a happy workforce, giving businesses added #VOOM.