Walls come alive with 3D

Flat walls are passé. Now you can add a new dimension to the walls and floor of your house with the recent innovation in the ceramics industry — 3D tiles’. There’s more to it. Ceramics also offer digital tiles that have imprinted high resolution pictures and can produce thousands of uniformly designed tiles with no variance in colour or pattern. The technology upgrade makes ordinary rooms look large, grand and beautiful.

While ‘3D tiles’ is a year-old concept and is slowly catching up with metros, ‘digital tiles’ is just four-month old and is selling like hot cakes. Companies like Somany, Kajaria, Johnson and Rak Ceramics are betting high on these value-added products with better margins. The demand is more in bigger cities, where people are aware of the latest trends.

Sanjeev Ranjan, deputy general manager, marketing, Somany Ceramics Limited says: “We are gradually shifting our focus on value added products that offer us better margins. Our business strategy is to increase production of value added tiles like 3D, V-shield hard coat technology, digital tiles and gradually out-source the plain ordinary tiles. 3D tiles offer almost double the mar-gins we get on normal flat tiles.”

“Today, people see tiles as a lifestyle product and are willing to pay a premium cost for tiles that are aesthetically designed and inbuilt with latest technology. Our customers are the upper and upper middle class consumer who have money and are connoisseurs of art and style. They are the ones who are ready to experiment with the latest technology and willing to pay extra amount for value added benefits.”

While a flat tile costs around Rs 20-40 per square feet, 3D tiles costs almost double the amount.

A Kajaria Ceramics spokesperson says: “The urban consumers today want lesser number of joints on their walls. So they prefer bigger tiles of 30*60 cms or 45*90 cms. The digital and 3D pattern works best on large tiles surfaces. We introduced our ‘digital tiles’ range four months back and it has received good response both from residential and commercial housing projects.”