Chesney’s sold as many stone staircases after the last Natural Stone Show as it had sold in the previous five years. That’s why the company will be back at the Natural Stone Show in ExCeL London on 30 April-2 May next year.

Director Mark Burns says: “We are just looking forward to getting ourselves back in there again and talking to people. We found it very, very positive – three days of talking to people and everyone just being wowed by our product.”

Mark says the 2011 Natural Stone Show, the first the company had exhibited at, was one of the most successful shows the company has ever participated in.

London-based company Chesney’s is best known for its classically-designed fireplaces – it sells around 5,000 of them a year, mostly in the UK and America although they are also becoming increasingly popular in the Far East.

But in recent years Chesney’s has been expanding its product range into other areas of architectural stonework, which can be produced alongside its fireplaces at its two factories. It was to promote this expansion into other areas that the company exhibited at the 2011 Natural Stone Show.

It displayed a staircase on its stand, which is one of the areas it wants to grow. Mark was glad it did because he was surprised by how many designer and client visitors did not realise stairs could be solid stone. They seemed to expect the stone to be cladding concrete and the exhibition gave the company the rare opportunity to actually put the product in front of customers.

Chesney’s sold its first cantilevered staircase in 2005. Before exhibiting at the Natural Stone Show it had sold seven of them in five years. Since the Stone Show it has doubled that number.

Mark says Chesney’s made 10 top-notch contacts with architects and clients at the Show that more than justified being there. But it did not stop there.

Mark: “The biggest thing about it was that within a couple of weeks we were getting so many enquiries. Even main contractors were contacting us through the leaflets we had distributed at the Stone Show, which was most useful.

“To generate such a wave of interest was absolutely astounding for us. We were literally getting enquiries week after week.”

What particularly pleased him was that architects had brought clients to the show and while architects would probably not go back to a client and suggest an alternative to wooden stairs they had already designed, clients did not have the same reticence about asking their architects to change the design after they had seen the stone stairs.