Sunday September 5, 2021

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise if you’re on this website, but we sell Marquees.

Of course, we also sell accessories, like bags to keep your marquee in, storm kits and ground stakes to keep your Marquee grounded, click together flooring to make your marquee more inviting and lining and other items to make your Marquee spectacular.

But mainly we actually sell marquees – small ones, medium ones, and very large ones. Economic ones, value for money premium ones and high-grade professional ones.

But then again that may be the actual product that we sell but when you think about it, what we really sell is in fact solutions – we sell party venues, storage facilities, pop up catering halls, portable kitchens, wedding venues, temporary facilities, and increased floor space for pubs, hotels, leisure clubs and entertaining in general.
We sell the means to hold indoor events, outdoors, in well ventilated, weather protected environments. Spaces that make a statement about the host, that the host cares about their guests.

So yes, we sell Marquees.

UK Tents is one of a number of company’s that sell Marquees so it begs the question why would you want to buy from us? What makes UK Tents different?

Simple enough question but one that deserves more than one answer.

When we formed the company, we realised one of the biggest issues customers face is delivery timescales. Most marquee and party tent companies have no UK warehousing or manufacturing presence. Rather they ship orders from mainland Europe or beyond. The UK’s withdrawal from the European single market (Brexit), the pandemic and just geography each adds time to deliveries. We have a major storage and shipping facility near Bedford and can therefore quote delivery timescales in days rather than weeks or months. We keep our website revised and therefore the estimated delivery timescales shown are pretty much what we can achieve (or better). Therefore, you can order with confidence knowing that we will normally get your marquee to you in good time.

We also, as a company mission, decided that customer service was critical. We have a fully staffed help desk and advice line during office hours, can give impartial advice and stock levels and delivery timescales.

As well as using an external courier company, we also employ our own delivery drivers to help reduce delivery times further AND we offer click and collect as well. We are happy to step in where others have been unable to meet your needs. Indeed, on a number of occasions we have been able to supply SAME DAY DELIVERY or delivered on a bank holiday! We are one of the few companies in this field that have UK storage facilities. Most will ship directly from mainland Europe or even further afield! Check out our previous newsletter for a few examples.

We pride ourselves on customer satisfaction. We are not happy until you are happy. We guarantee spare parts for ten years (because accidents do sometimes happen). But don’t go on what we say, after all we’re unlikely to say anything but positive things about our own company on our own website in our own news updates. I would invite you instead to look at what our customers are saying about us. Have a peek at why you should choose us and the link to our Trustpilot reviews.

The modern way of stock control (just ask any supermarket) is the “just in time model” – the principle being that you closely monitor sales and then buy in replenishment stock just in time to refill your shelves rather than the old fashioned way of buy, store, sell, deliver. A lot of our competitors will adopt this modern way, after all they don’t want inventory taking up valuable warehouse space! We are different, call us old school if you like but we know that what we sell is for a purpose. We know that our products facilitate parties, weddings, events of all shapes and sizes. We decided from the outset to build this business with our customer in mind and not our own storage costs. Of course, we keep an eye on market trends, which products are the most popular and are in close communication with our manufacturing arm. However, rather than buy to meet supply needs we buy in anticipation. We keep our warehouse topped up with the full range of sizes, designs and grades as well as the full range of accessories so that when you order, you’ll have the confidence to know we can supply from existing stock rather than the eight to or more weeks lead time (caused by the company you ordered from having to wait for the actual tent to be manufactured and then shipped across the globe, before finally being sent to you by a local courier). We’ve heard horror stories of fifteen weeks plus being either quoted or revised once the order had been placed. I’ve lost count of the number of marquee’s we’ve sold as a result of customers cancelling orders with other suppliers and then turning to us.

If you’re working to a budget, then I would challenge you to compare our prices to our competitors on a like for like basis. Again, one of our founding director’s principles was to keep our costs competitive, not by cutting quality, but simply by making keen deals with our manufacturers, buying in bulk, and passing those savings on to our customers.

And speaking of quality. If you are investing in a marquee, will be erecting, and disassembling and leaving it in storage for periods, maybe a garage or a shed, then quality is critical. All our marquees have a galvanised steel framework. More robust than the lighter weight and easily bent aluminium framed ones that are on the market and galvanised to protect against corrosion. Our roof tarpaulins are always single piece as this protects against leaks in rainy weather. All come with full instructions and require no special tools (maybe a hammer for pegs). We use nuts and bolts for critical connections (wing nuts, no special tools remember?) and are easy to assemble (we’d always recommend two people to a build). Many can be assembled in under an hour and of course disassembled just as quickly.

We hope you are a discerning enough customer to shop around, we appreciate it’s a significant investment. We also hope that as a discerning customer you’ll choose us to supply your marquee needs. We look forward to speaking with you.