"The glaze has failed." What do you say to your customer?

The customer complaint:

Being a natural product that is fired in a kiln, there will always be some tiles in each batch that show some imperfections. Before packaging, tiles are graded and any with visible imperfections are removed and sold as seconds. Nonetheless a few will always slip through the system. In some remarkable instances the glaze may have been improperly fired to the body of the tile but this is extremely rare in modern tiles. The photo above shows massive glaze failure on tiles from the exterior of a 90 year old building. This hardly ever happens today and I think we can all agree that the guarantee, if any, has long since expired. The cause in this case was massive moisture absorption from rain seeping into the substrate which after decades eventually caused the glaze to start popping off.

Much mor common are tiles with tiny strips of missing glaze on the edges. These tiles are perfectly sound, but all the same are imperfect. International standards allow 5% of any first grade consignment to have some visual imperfections, this means that 5 tiles in each group of 100 tiles may have some imperfections. The tiler should always put these tiles aside and use them when a cut tile is needed.

If a customer complains of a tiling project that has obvious imperfect tiles installed, like glaze missing on the edges, then it is simply because the tiler has not checked the tiles as he laid them. Defect tiles can slip through the factory. Faults like missing glaze on the edge of a tile, firing cracks, craters, bubbles, pinholes or smudged patterns. are all visible things and the installer should put these tiles aside and not use them.

So what do you do?

If the tiles have not been installed they should be returned and you should exchange them matching shades for the customer. The tiler should then install the new ones. Remember that no claims can be made once tiles have been laid.

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