My very first project when I was hired in 2017 was the Top 50 Glaziers’ 25th anniversary issue. It was a big project. I combed through our print magazine archive, looking through 25 years’ worth of the magazines, recording which companies had been on the industry ranking for decades and documenting the challenges they had faced.
The Top 50 Glaziers industry ranking launched in 1992, and after it was first published, some in the industry pointed out that the ranking did not capture the full breadth and quality of the contract glazing industry given that it ranks companies only by their North American contract glazing gross sales.
This is true. For the 33 years of its run, the ranking has featured leading contract glazing companies based on their reported or estimated gross sales. To underline the ranking’s purpose, I’ll throw back to former Glass Magazine Editor Charles Cumpston, who in his Editor’s Notes in the 1999 Top 50 Glaziers issue reminded readers that “The Top 50 is not a competition. It is our way of trying to give some perspective to the contract glazing community (which is not easy because it is so diffuse) and to give public recognition to companies which receive far too little of it for the work they do.”
This remains true for the Top 50 Glaziers industry ranking. I would add that over the more than three-decade run of the list, it has also grown from a two-page industry ranking into a full market report. We ask responding glaziers to complete a 40-plus question survey that asks for gross sales information, but also solicits information regarding regional growth, recent and forthcoming trends, as well as their insights about new and perennial challenges for contract glaziers, and for the glass industry more broadly.
The information from that market report, which is available in print and online, remains free to the industry. Not every contract glazing company will be one that makes the Top 50 ranking. But hopefully, the insights and market data made available in the report, which now includes years’ worth of insight into the growth and change of this segment of the industry, can help other contract glazing firms make decisions about their own businesses and help them take the temperature of the market.
I’ll crib again from Cumpston, who in his June 2002 Ed Notes said, “Size isn’t everything. It’s only one way that a company can be measured. More important is the kind of good work performed day in and day out that gives a company a good reputation, that engenders repeat business, and that gives the sense of a job well done to its employees.”
In Glass Magazine, we aim to provide the information and education that the industry needs to perform the crucial “day in and day out” work of creating the built environment. That means ultimately, the insights and indicators offered by leading companies, are for everyone’s use.
