Topps Tiles

[robbo]

Went to Topps today to pick up the advesive and grout etc for my First Job, had great service from them, the girl even helped me carry the materials to my car without even being asked.

Big up to Topps!

[pjc]

at that price thay can aford to

[Leatherface]

Personally would never use Topps.
No disrespect to anyone ( only my opinion ) - too expensive. better selection of tiles, tools & adhesive elsewhere at a better price. More knowlegable staff elsewhere.

[Dan]

If you have a relationship with topps you can bet your life they've get you more business than most independent stores though. And the merchants / disti's don't always send you work.

Plus, if you're charging a profit on the adhesives and you charge 10% on £3.50 compared to 10% on £25 you can see why the guys that get the work from topps make a bit more than the rest.

I've said before, well done anybody who has managed to find the cheapest place to buy from AND they send you lots of profitable business.

But the truth is Topps get high footflows. They're on retail parks and advertise on TV and god knows what else (they rank #1 in Google for tiles) and have a massive advertising budget. So if you do manage to get in with topps you're backed by some big firm there.

But if you're buying the gear yourself then obviously you need to be finding the happy medium between getting your gear cheap and getting work to use that gear on.
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To add. There's a market for them all. Topps and similar, CTD and the rest and then the independent stores etc.

Around my area we have local tilers buying direct from manufacturers such as Johnsons etc. So we can cut out Topps in that sense if you do enough and do it right, but that's a totally different tiling business to those that just want to tile and not sell tiles and organise the gear and do the whole job (with profit always in mind).