"Carglass changes, Carglass repairs": Where did the windshield giant come from?

Ronnie Lubner was a businessman, but also a simple man. He used to wear a plaid shirt, watch football matches on television, and joke about everything. "Before starting a meeting, he would always crack several jokes," recalled Marc Lubner, his nephew, just four months ago. He told this to a room packed with family and friends who had wanted to say their final goodbyes to one of the biggest names in the glass industry. Ronnie Lubner and his son Gary led the Belron Group for decades. It is the multinational company that owns windshield replacement brands such as Carglass—which operates in some thirty countries, including Spain—and more than a dozen other brands spread across five continents. Today, the company employs more than 30,000 people, serves 15 million customers annually, and has a turnover of €6.46 billion per year. All this, just by replacing and repairing windshields.

The story behind Carglass's success dates back to the middle of the last century, when Doulton Glass, an English company specializing in glass and crystal, hired the young Ronnie Lubner. The company was looking for someone well-versed in the sector to relaunch the brand, which was going through a tough time. The first thing they did was change the name to Solaglas to avoid confusion with a historic ceramics company: Royal Doulton. They changed the signage of the hundred or so stores they had in the United Kingdom and all their trucks. This repositioning was key to the brand's takeoff, which ultimately achieved success when it acquired James Clark, the second-largest chain of glass retailers in Great Britain, founded in 1851. This placed Solaglas at the forefront of the highly fragmented British sector: it now controlled 20%.

By 1987, Solaglas was already expanding across Europe, and to that end, it purchased a small Belgian company called Carglass. It had been founded by two brothers in 1938, Jean and Arthur Leroi. Little by little, it had been carving out a niche in Central Europe. When Solaglas bought the business, it had 13 locations in Belgium, two in the Netherlands, and one more in northern France. It maintained the brand, with Hugo Leroi managing the workshops a year later. It opened in Portugal and Italy under the Autoglass brand. In 1990, Solaglas was renamed Belron, the name of the current group, which has been controlled by the Belgian investment firm D'Ieteren since 1999.

The conquest of Spain

The company arrived in Spain in 1998 and opened workshops in Barcelona. Three years later, they already had them in the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the Valencian Country. As the company expanded, it acquired Servicristal, a company that operated in Vitoria, Valladolid, Santander, and Valencia. It was at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, with 105 centers throughout Spain, that the company entered the advertising world.

"They've worked their marketing game with two very specific objectives: raising awareness about the need to repair car windshields to avoid driving risks and boosting brand recognition," analyzes Neus Soler, a marketing expert at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Regarding the second aspect, Soler cites the famousjinglewhich is still heard today on both Catalan and Spanish radio and television: "Carglass changes, Carglass repairs." "The sum of all this results in a positioning top of mind"When consumers think about this highly specialized market segment, this brand is the only one that comes to mind," the expert says.

By 2013, the company had accelerated to 136 locations in Spain and had partnered with brands like Bosch to run windshield wiper promotions. By 2016, there were already more than 211 workshops and 1,100 employees in Spain. By 2023, in Spain alone, Carglass had generated €226 million in revenue, according to data from the Commercial Registry.