Stainless steel has always been a big part of our world, together with aluminium, galvanised and other sheet materials.
Over the years we’ve manufactured bakery trolleys, provers, catering equipment, tables, deep fryers, shopfitting, industrial equipment, brackets, enclosures, prototypes and thousands of components we’ve probably forgotten about.
Some were made once.
Others were made hundreds of thousands of times.
The interesting part was never really the piece of metal. It was what somebody imagined it could become.
The professors
Every sheet-metal business knows them. We affectionately call them the professors.
They arrive carrying a drawing, a cardboard model, an old broken part or something sketched on the back of an envelope. They need “just one prototype.” Once we’ve perfected it, naturally, they’re going to order 10,000.
Usually they don’t.
But every now and again, one of the professors is right. I can think of three products that came through our doors as rough ideas and went on to become extremely successful businesses. One eventually sold in the millions.
Which taught us an important lesson.