The glazing industry had already had a slow start to 2026 before the conflict with Iran began. Business was ticking over, but consumer confidence was soft, order books were thinner than most would have liked, and margins were already under pressure from rising employment costs. Then came the Strait of Hormuz.
On 4 March, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil markets into immediate shock. Brent crude moved from $73 a barrel in late February to $120 by 9 March – a 65% spike in under two weeks. It has settled back to around $106 since, but analysts are not forecasting a quick resolution. The title of a recent Al Jazeera commentary says it plainly: “why the oil and gas price shock from the Iran war won’t just fade away.”
If this conflict extends into the medium and long term – which, at this point, looks more likely than not – the consequences for our industry will be significant. In this article I want to be honest about what I think is coming, explain the mechanisms behind it, and then make a case for what I believe is the right strategic response. Some of it will feel counter-intuitive. But the evidence is clear.
The Cost Chain: From Oil Prices to Your Margins
Let’s start with the cost side, because this is where businesses will feel the impact first.
Glass is the most directly exposed material in our industry. Float glass production is extraordinarily energy-intensive. The furnaces run continuously at extremely high temperatures and cannot simply be switched off and restarted – which means manufacturers have very little ability to absorb energy price spikes by reducing output. Higher energy costs feed through to glass prices quickly and without much buffer. This is not a theoretical risk. It is happening now.
PVC and uPVC are oil-derived materials. The production process runs from crude oil through ethylene and vinyl chloride monomer to PVC resin – every step of which is sensitive to the oil price. The lag between an oil price spike and a PVC price increase at the supplier level is slightly longer than for glass, but the direction of travel is the same. When oil stays elevated for months rather than weeks, PVC costs follow.
For installers, this creates a specific and painful problem: you are quoting work today at prices that don’t yet reflect the material costs you will actually incur by the time you come to fit. If your quoting system doesn’t account for this – and most don’t – you will be systematically undercharging as costs rise beneath you. This is how good businesses get into serious financial trouble without fully understanding why.
For fabricators and systems houses, the picture is equally uncomfortable. Higher input costs at a time when installer customers are under their own margin pressure creates a supply chain squeeze that runs in both directions.
Consumer Confidence: The Data Is Already Telling the Story
Windows and doors are a big-ticket, discretionary consumer purchase. People don’t have to buy them. They choose to – when they feel financially secure, when they’re confident about the future, and when they have access to finance or savings. Strip away that confidence and they wait.
The GfK Consumer Confidence Index for March 2026, released this week, has dropped to -21. But the more telling figure is the Major Purchase Index, which dropped four points in a single month to -18. This is the specific measure that tracks people’s willingness to make significant spending decisions – exactly the category that windows and doors fall into. That four-point drop happened in the first weeks of the conflict. We are at the very beginning of what could be a sustained deterioration in consumer sentiment.
History is instructive here. In previous periods of sustained uncertainty – the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, the energy price shock of 2022 – home improvement spending was consistently one of the first discretionary categories to soften. The glazing industry knows this pattern well. What is different this time is the speed of onset and the combination of factors arriving simultaneously.
A Triple Squeeze: Why This Downturn Feels Different
What makes the current environment particularly challenging is that the material cost pressure and the consumer demand pressure are not arriving in isolation. They are landing on top of an employment cost base that already rose sharply at the start of April.
The National Living Wage increased to £12.71 per hour at the start of this month – a 4.1% rise. Employer National Insurance, already up to 15% with the threshold reduced to £5,000 from last April, continues to add cost to every employed team member. For businesses running fitting teams on employed contracts, the labour cost line has moved materially in the last twelve months.
There is also the interest rate question. The conflict is already pushing UK inflation forecasts upward – ING is projecting a peak of around 4% in autumn 2026 if energy prices remain elevated. That puts the Bank of England in an uncomfortable position: raise rates to fight inflation and further suppress the housing market and consumer borrowing, or hold and risk inflation expectations becoming entrenched. Either path is bad for a market where remortgaging, equity release, and consumer confidence in the value of property are historically among the strongest drivers of home improvement spending decisions.
Costs up. Revenue under pressure. Employment costs already elevated. This is a genuine triple squeeze, and businesses that are not prepared for it will find themselves in serious difficulty.
What You Should Do: Step One – Get Lean
The right response to a tightening market starts with your cost base. Not panic cuts – but a rigorous, disciplined audit of where your money is going, what it is returning, and where it can be reduced without damaging your capability to trade.
Start with your gross margin. Not the margin you think you’re making – the margin you are actually making, job by job, product by product. Many businesses in this sector genuinely do not know this figure. They have a target mark-up in their head and assume they’re hitting it. In our experience, the gap between assumed margin and actual margin is often ten percentage points or more once remedials, travel time, wasted material, and missed costs are properly accounted for.
Look at your overhead structure too. Vehicles, premises, subscriptions, staffing – all of it. In good times, overhead creep goes unnoticed. In a tightening market, it becomes dangerous. Build a proper monthly view of your costs against your revenue and track it. If you are not already producing monthly management accounts and reviewing them, now is the time to start. Flying blind when the weather turns is not a strategy.
Also review your pricing – urgently. If material costs are rising and your prices are fixed on quotes submitted weeks ago, you need a plan. That might mean building material cost escalation clauses into future quotes, shortening quote validity periods, or simply having the commercial confidence to reprice. Underpricing in a rising cost environment is not a route to winning good business. It is a route to working harder for less money.
What You Should Do: Step Two – Do Not Cut Your Marketing
This is the part that will feel wrong. When revenue is under pressure, marketing is usually the first budget to get cut. It feels discretionary. It feels like a luxury. I want to argue, strongly and with evidence, that this instinct is exactly backwards.
A softer market does not mean nobody is buying windows and doors. People still move house. Roofs still leak. Windows still fail. Properties still need upgrading. The pool of potential customers shrinks – but it does not disappear. And in a smaller pool, the prize goes to the company that is most visible, most trusted, and most front of mind when the purchase decision is made.
This is the principle of share of voice. When your competitors reduce their marketing spend – and in a downturn, most of them will – maintaining your own spend increases your relative presence in the market without necessarily costing you more. You are, in effect, buying market share at a discount.
The research on this is compelling and consistent. Kantar analysed brands’ behaviour during the 2008 recession and found that those which maintained advertising investment recovered nine times faster than those that went dark. Harvard Business Review data shows that 80% of companies that cut marketing spend during a downturn had still not recovered their pre-recession sales and profits three years after conditions improved. These are not small effects. They are the difference between a business that comes through a difficult period stronger and one that never quite recovers.
The type of marketing matters too. In a downturn, the temptation is to go pure direct response – Google Ads, lead generation, price-led promotions – because it feels more measurable and more immediately connected to sales. And yes, you should protect your performance marketing budget, because that captures the people who are actively looking right now. But do not go completely dark on brand. The businesses that come out of a downturn fastest are the ones that stayed visible throughout it. Consumers remember who was there when times were hard.
This is exactly what we did at Everest. In a core window and door market that shrank by c.30% between 2007 and 2010, Everest cut its operational cost, invested it back into marketing (in particular returning to television advertising for the first time in many years), and saw sales grow throughout this entire period.
My recommendation is this: use the cost savings you identify in step one to fund your marketing in step two. Become leaner operationally and administratively, and redeploy those savings into maintaining – or even increasing – your market presence. This is not reckless spending. It is a deliberate investment in the long-term health of your business.
The Businesses That Will Come Through This Stronger
I have been in this industry for over thirty years. I have seen downturns – the early 1990s recession, the post-2008 collapse in consumer spending, the disruption of the pandemic. Each time, the same pattern repeats. A significant number of businesses contract, cut, retreat, and ultimately disappear. A smaller number use the downturn to get operationally tighter, maintain their visibility, and capture the market share that the retreating businesses leave behind.
The businesses that emerge from a difficult period in the best shape are almost always the ones that went into it with the clearest view of their own numbers. They knew their real margins. They tracked their costs. They had management accounts they trusted. That financial clarity allowed them to make decisions quickly and confidently, rather than reacting with panic when the cash flow started to tighten.
Nobody knows how long this conflict will last or how severe the economic disruption will be. What we do know is that the time to prepare is now – not when the pressure is already on. Review your costs. Understand your margins. Protect your marketing. And make sure you have the financial information you need to navigate whatever comes next.
If you’d like help reviewing your numbers or working through what this environment means for your business specifically, get in touch. This is exactly the kind of situation where having the right people in your corner makes a real difference.