How We Manufacture — From Raw Body to Packed Pallet

The production sequence

1. Body preparation. Clays, feldspar, quartz and additives are milled with water into a slurry, then spray-dried into a fine free-flowing powder with a controlled moisture content. Get the moisture wrong here and the tile will not press to a consistent density, which shows up as size variation after firing.
2. Pressing. The powder is compacted in a hydraulic press at very high pressure. For a full body tile the pigment is already blended through this powder; for a double charged tile two hoppers feed a plain base and a pigmented top layer that are pressed together in one stroke.
3. Drying. The pressed tile still carries residual moisture and is dried gradually. Drying too fast cracks the body, and the crack may not appear until firing.
4. Decoration. For GVT and PGVT, digital printers apply the design at high resolution from many different faces, so the pattern does not repeat visibly across a floor, followed by the glaze that will become the wear surface. Full body tiles skip this stage entirely.
5. Firing. The tile passes through a roller kiln at 1200 degrees Celsius or above for around an hour. This is where vitrification happens — the silica and feldspar melt and fuse the body into a dense, glass-like mass with water absorption below 0.5 per cent. It is also where the tile shrinks, by several per cent, which is why fired sizes have to be sorted.
6. Polishing and finishing. Polished tiles are ground and buffed through progressively finer heads. Rectified tiles are squared to an exact size on a calibrating line. Step tiles have their nosing profile ground and grooved here.
7. Sorting and grading. Every tile is inspected and sorted by shade and by calibre — its precise fired dimension — and the batch codes are printed on the carton. This stage decides whether a project floor will match itself.
8. Packing and palletising. Cartons are shrink-wrapped onto pallets, labelled with the size, shade, calibre and quantity, and loaded. Private-label orders are packed in the buyer's own carton artwork at this point.

Why firing shrinkage matters to you

A tile leaves the press larger than it leaves the kiln. During firing the body densifies and shrinks by several per cent, and that shrinkage is not perfectly uniform — it varies slightly with the position in the kiln, the moisture in the powder and the exact composition of that day's body batch.

The consequence is that tiles of nominally the same size come out of the kiln at marginally different dimensions. Manufacturers handle this by sorting the fired output into calibres, so all the tiles in one carton are the same actual size even if a carton from another batch differs by a millimetre.

This is why the calibre code on the carton matters as much as the shade code, and why mixing cartons from different batches on one floor produces joints that visibly wander. Rectified tiles sidestep the problem: they are mechanically ground to an exact dimension after firing, which is what allows a 2 mm joint on a large-format floor.

Quality control and shade sorting · Tile buying guide

What we can change to order

• Size and format — custom dimensions to OEM specification, subject to press tooling and a lead time we will quote with the price.
• Colour and shade — matched against a physical sample you send us.
• Surface finish — matt, polished, honed, textured, structured or anti-skid on the same decor.
• Thickness — from 9 mm up to 20 mm structural pavers.
• Carton and pallet — private-label artwork, box quantity and pallet labelling to your format.
• Batch control — a whole project produced in one firing run for shade consistency.

Frequently asked questions