January 2020

BMI: Golden Tile
BMI REDLAND’S GOLDEN TOUCH
AS IT MARKS 100 NOT OUT...
BMI Redland ‘does the ton’ and marks 100 not out with Golden Tile competition.
After a year of eager anticipation, BMI UK &
Ireland has marked the remarkable
achievement of 100 years of concrete tile
manufacture in the UK through its iconic BMI
Redland brand.
November 1919 was when the Redhill Tile
Company was founded and on Tuesday December
3rd 2019, the company staged a national
celebration with a party at every plant, depot and
office across the company’s 16 UK sites. Over
600 employees and associates joined in the fun,
with all the traditional party trimmings of cake,
balloons and poppers in the mix.
Customers now also have a chance to join in the
celebrations as the company has launched a
Golden Tile competition, with a whopping £1,000
in shopping vouchers to be won as first prize. The
Golden Tile (spoiler alert: it’s concrete!) has been
hidden by the BMI team in a random pallet of
tiles at a secret location and was released into
the marketplace in January. To reflect the
teamwork that goes into most roofing jobs, the
£1,000 will be split into small denominations to
allow the winning customer to share the bounty
among their colleagues. The
competition is being
promoted on the
company’s Facebook,
Twitter and LinkedIn
feeds.
Momentous year
The Golden Tile prize
promotion caps a
momentous year for
BMI UK & Ireland.
Over the past 12
months, the company has been sharing details of
its rich heritage, innovation and achievements,
not just from 1919 when Redland started making
its first roof tiles – at the rate of 40 per hour – in
“The company has
launched a Golden Tile
competition, with a
whopping £1,000 in
shopping vouchers to
be won as first prize”
a sand pit in Reigate, Surrey; but from a
pedigree dating back over 180
years with the origins of the
Rosemary clay tile in 1837.
This final instalment covers the
onset of the new millennium and
brings events right up to the
present celebratory day.
For BMI Icopal, the new millennium
got off to a great start with the
acquisition of Monarflex, a move
which heralded its entry into the
specialist building membrane market.
Things were more challenging at Redland in terms
of its survival as a household name as, in 2003,
its parent Lafarge decided to rebrand the group in
its own likeness and retire the well-loved name in
favour of a global brand strategy.
Happily for Redland, this sorry state of affairs
didn’t last too long as in 2007 Lafarge divested
itself of its roofing division, which became the
Monier Group. Better still, in 2008 Monier
reinstated the Redland name in the UK. Five
years later, the Rosemary plain clay tile – then
owned by Redland for nearly 30 years –
celebrated its 175th birthday with the launch of
Craftsman, a handcrafted clay plain tile.
The following year, 2014, the Monier Group was
renamed as the Braas-Monier Building Group;
while Icopal cemented its position in the liquid
applied waterproofing market with the acquisition
of Sealoflex.
Clip it
In product news, the launch of the decade was
2015’s introduction of the Innofix clip. This was
in response to the 2014 updating of BS 5534:
Code of Practice for Slating and Tiling to improve
40 TC JANUARY 2020