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TOP PRODUCTS 2021 Welcome to Professional Builder’s prestigious annual industry accolade – the awards which celebrate the innovations of the past twelve months. These are the products and services that have enhanced your profitability, or simply made life just that little bit easier on site – and the best thing is that they are chosen by you, our readers, the experts at the sharp end of a sector that remains amongst the most buoyant. With the injunction to ‘build back better’ ultimately left to the nation’s army of white van men and women, 2021 has been a year when the status of tradespeople has taken on a new importance. Homebound property owners have been turning to builders to transform their domestic spaces, and you have answered the call with
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record levels of activity. Much more than a magazine, Professional Builder is now able to communicate the information you need to fulfil that demand across multiple platforms. The following pages feature the ideas that have caught your eye in the medium of print, as well as our digital coverage and advertising.
TOP PRODUCT AWARD 2021
The Charles Godfrey Award 2021 E very year, Professional Builder bestows a special prize in honour of our former Products Editor, Charles Godfrey. As a champion of the entrepreneurial inventor who toils – often over many years – to deliver a timesaving solution to the trades, it is these solitary designers and makers that are the most fitting recipients of an honour that bears Charles’s name, and this year, our judges have chosen the Matey Measure™. Measure twice and cut once might be the old adage, but there are times when your trusty tape might still leave you short. As a time-served builder of over 30 years its inventor, Stephen Capon is all too aware of how some of the seemingly smallest problems can create significant issues further down the track – and that’s where Matey Measure makes its mark. Tape measures, will of course, bend in an internal recess, which makes it very difficult to measure accurately. When the Brighton-based builder was struggling to gauge the dimensions of a deep recess at the back of a kitchen in order to cut a glass panel to fit the space exactly, he had his Eureka moment. “You have to create a template to cut
glass and, because of the awkward access, as there always is in these cases, there was an element of guesswork involved and you could be as much as 3 or 4mm out, which means making the template Experienced tradesman, bigger to compensate. I was Stephen Capon (right) is the inventor of the Matey Measure thinking then that there must be a better way – and that was the germ of the idea.” “The device securely clips onto a tape measure,” he explains. “If you are measuring a window reveal, because the tape will bow where the two perpendicular angles meet, you won’t get a completely accurate number. With the Matey Measure, however, it’s possible to get hard up against the wall, or cabinet, or under tiles above a kitchen worktop, or whatever marks the end of the distance you’re looking to calculate, and it will clearly show the exact length.” FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE MATEY MEASURE VISIT WWW.RDR.LINK/BAB027
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