Fascias Etc — Trade Brochure & Ecommerce
An inaugural trade brochure and B2B ecommerce website for an Essex fascias and building products supplier — replacing manual ordering with a fast, integrated system and launching their first-ever printed catalogue.
Results
Trade Brochure Design and Ecommerce for Essex Building Supplies — Fascias Etc
For a trade supplier, two things matter above everything else: being easy to do business with, and looking like a company worth doing business with. The first is a process question. The second is a brand and marketing question. Both matter, and both are best solved together.
Fascias Etc supplies fascias and building products to the trade across Essex. They had a strong product range, established trade relationships, and the operational capability to service customers well. What they lacked was the printed and digital infrastructure to present themselves with the professionalism their business had earned.
The Challenge
Fascias Etc had no printed catalogue — nothing a trades customer could flick through at the depot or the merchant counter to understand the range. And their ordering process was manual: phone calls, emails, handwritten notes — fine for a small volume of orders, but not designed for growth.
Both challenges needed solving, and they needed to be solved in a way that was practical for a trade business: straightforward, robust and fast to market.
For marketing for small businesses in the building products trade, the priority is always utility over aesthetics. A brochure that works is worth more than a brochure that wins design awards. A checkout process that a busy contractor can complete in two minutes matters more than one that looks impressive.
The Approach
We tackled the print and digital projects in parallel. The inaugural trade brochure — Fascias Etc’s first-ever printed catalogue — was designed to work as a practical sales tool: clear product categories, consistent imagery, pricing structures laid out in a way that made sense for trade buyers.
Print design and services for trade catalogues is a specific discipline. The design needs to be clean enough to feel professional, but functional enough to actually serve as a reference document. Product images, specifications, order codes — all organised logically, with the trade customer’s workflow in mind.
In parallel, the ecommerce platform was built around the same principle of simplicity. Our web design in Colchester for trade ecommerce focuses on the buying journey: find the product, confirm the specification, complete the order. No unnecessary friction, no steps that don’t serve the customer.
Integration with Fascias Etc’s office systems was built in from the start — orders landing directly into the existing workflow without manual re-entry.
The Solution
The finished brochure was a genuine commercial asset: printed to a high standard, structured logically, and designed to live in a contractor’s van alongside other supplier catalogues. For a business with no previous print presence, it represented a significant step forward in how they presented themselves to the trade.
The ecommerce platform went live on schedule with the full product range. Trade customers could log in, browse and order around the clock — without needing to pick up the phone. The integration with office systems meant orders arrived cleanly into the existing fulfilment workflow.
The Outcome
Director Milan Shah described the experience simply: Thinksay took the pain out of the process, made it simple, and integrated it with the office systems. That consistency of outcome — making the complicated feel straightforward — is something we’re proud of across all our trade ecommerce work.
For Fascias Etc, the combination of a professional trade brochure and a working ecommerce platform gave the business the tools to grow without growing its administrative burden proportionally.
If you’re a trade business in Essex needing print design and services or a B2B ecommerce platform, we’ve done this before and we’d love to help.
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Ready to start your project? Let’s have a chat — no obligation, no jargon, just an honest conversation about what you need and how we can help.
Thinksay took the pain out of this process, made the system simple, and integrated it with our office systems.
No sales pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about where your business is and where you want to go.