DELABIE is Europe’s leading manufacturer of water controls and sanitary fittings for commercial environments. A family-owned enterprise with over 90 years’ experience, the company provides innovative, hygienic and sustainable solutions for the non-domestic sector, including education, leisure and highly frequented environments.
Its product offering comprises 5 core ranges – commercial water controls, water controls for healthcare, accessibility and hygienic accessories, stainless steel sanitary equipment and specialist controls for professional catering.
The company invests heavily in research, developing products that offer water savings, hygiene, accessibility, safety, durability and reliability. Especially designed for intensive use and manufactured from strictly controlled raw materials, DELABIE’s water controls are continually tested in our laboratories in order to improve their performance. Every product is controlled at each manufacturing stage and is individually tested before delivery to ensure that it meets the demands of public places such as hospitals, nursing and care homes, schools, hotels and leisure centres.
Exporting to more than 90 countries from its French production facility, the company operates through its subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Benelux, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain United Arab Emirates and China.
“Africa is a good and growing market for Delabie, indeed. As I explained, we provide, water savings, resistance to intensive use and hygiene for public places. These are strong arguments that convince easily commercials owners. Historically, Delabie sells well in North Africa. Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria are countries we are working in for more than 20 years. We have intensified our activity all over the continent ten years ago with a good market response.
Delabie is selling for professional applications: airports, stadiums, hospitals, hotels, schools, museum, offices, shopping malls, prisons, train station. We notice that great infrastructures are constructed and needs these types of solutions. There is a real demand for water savings and quality products,” explains Grégoire Médina, Africa sales manager.
The company is working with building materials, sanitary wares, importers. They want their agents to focus on projects and to be good at specifying materials with consultants, architects and owners.
Delabie has technical products that have to be specified, this is a long task that request patience and determination. They try to support as much as possible their partners. Training is a necessity and the firm endeavors itself to bring the best technical and sales support.
“Our solutions are known to be long lasting, easy to use and ecofriendly. Nevertheless, the important thing to know is that we have a solution for every specific places. Let’s take a simple example. At home, everyone takes care about his faucets. Everyone closes his faucets and repairs it. Moreover, at home, we use a faucet for different purposes: washing, cleaning, filling bucket… so the faucet is designed to be polyvalent.
On the contrary, if we install our solution on a washbasin, at the arrival of an airport, the only goal of the tap is to wash hands of many users. Therefore, we design the faucet for this purpose and we make sure it lasts many years. We provide minimum 500 000 uses, in commercials. We also considerably reduce the flow rate as we don t need much water for it. The domestic faucet installed in an airport would never go that longer and would waste much water.
In addition to that, it is important to explain that we don’t install the same fittings in a prison, a hospital or a mall. The hospital is more into anti scalding solutions, hygiene. A mall is oriented into design, long lasting and comfort. Finally, a prison is more into security and vandal resistance. It means that we study our solutions to fit one specific building and we are fully dedicated to it. That is why we do not produce for residential market,” he explains.
Finally, Médina emphasize that, “it is important to specify high quality products to reduce the ensuing costs that appear afterwards. We have to take into account the global cost and not only the purchasing cost. The global cost is the sum of purchasing cost, replacing cost, the cost of energy and maintenance cost. I also want to say that final users are more and more caring about the modernity and the cleanliness of toilets in public places. There are many options to make toilets a comfortable and hygienic place.
Working with specialists always helps and saves money on the long run”.
