We’ve just passed the ‘200 hundred days to go’ point and no doubt we will be hearing much more about the Olympics and Paralympics as we move into 2012. It’s a good news story and that can’t be bad. Several members of the BMA have benefited from the massive building programme that has accompanied the Games. All bathroom products have been represented in the build and our members have been busy delivering fittings not only to the major sites in London but also to venues elsewhere in the country.
The major disappointment, though, is that we are not allowed to shout about it!
We are restricted from singing the praises of those suppliers. Bathroom manufacturers who have pushed their respective boats out to make the Olympics a successful event are restricted from making any decent PR out of their efforts. They are regarded simply as suppliers to the Games and they can only make the simplest of factual statements saying what they did.
Even more restraining is that all those fabulous, innovative and water efficient bathroom products cannot be branded. So the familiar and sometimes historic logos seen in public washrooms have had to be taken off, cleaned up and swept away. No supplier has been allowed to brand its products.
The Games rules state “any materials being supplied for Games venues which will be visible to the public during the Games must be supplied clean of any branding.”
As I said this has been a major disappointment for us. We should be extolling the virtues of our manufacturers not hiding them behind waste pipes!
So its going to be a ‘clean’ games in more ways than one - at least as far as quality bathrooms are concerned.