Forbo/ Nuway has been trading for 100 years and to mark the occasion has opned its doors to the public.
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NewsTranscript
00:00New Way in Telford. Hello sir.
00:03Hello.
00:04What's your name?
00:05My name's Jason Holmes and I'm Head of Design for Football Flooring, Textile Division.
00:09And New Way is one of my products and a product I'm very passionate about.
00:13Cool. Well, if we just go over by the board here. Come and snuggle up by the board there.
00:17Bit of a special year, isn't it, for the business?
00:20Yeah, we're celebrating 100 years. We were established in 1924 in Birmingham.
00:24A very small start-up in the backyard of Moseley Street.
00:28Yeah.
00:29And quickly grew, moved down to Spark Hill and then eventually in 1927 moved to Coalport
00:34where we were home in the old China Works for between 1927 and 1991.
00:40And you started, the business started, it was recycling old car tyres and mats for cars and...
00:47Yeah, one of our founders, a guy called Joseph Leonard Gaskin, used to build motorbikes.
00:51Not very successfully, so in 1924-25 he stopped doing that.
00:55But the garage where he was building the motorbikes out of used to be a key place for people to get their tyres changed.
01:00So I think he was surrounded by old tyres, passed the wire works on his way home two streets away,
01:05put two and two together and in 1926 patented a link mat which was the founding of the New Way product line.
01:12Was his patent the actual structure, like the link mat itself?
01:17I can show you the patent, it's just behind us.
01:19Yeah, yeah, shall we have a nose at that?
01:21Yeah.
01:23Ah!
01:25So this is the original patent from 1926.
01:27Yeah.
01:28Together with the very first piece of POS that we have.
01:31And then we've made a facsimile of the product from the original drawings and the original photograph.
01:36And you can see it's old car tyres, wire and a bit of leather.
01:40Yeah.
01:42So do you still hold the patent for that then?
01:45No, the patent expires every ten years.
01:47So after a number of years of renewing it...
01:49Yeah.
01:50...we've realised that it's not where the product is at the moment.
01:53Yeah.
01:54Product development is such that when you want to start covering larger areas,
01:58we needed a change in product format.
02:00So although the link mat format served us well,
02:03by about the 1950s, 1960s we were trying to target larger areas rather than just residential areas.
02:10So moving into factories, offices and retail.
02:13And one of the key products we developed was this one I'm holding here which is Tufti Guard.
02:17Tufti Guard.
02:18So this is kind of, it's made of, you do a bamboo version?
02:22Yeah.
02:23And an aluminium.
02:24And aluminium's all recycled.
02:26Bamboo's really sustainable.
02:28And it basically covers large areas.
02:30It's an extruded product.
02:32And we manufacture the raw materials for the rubber on site here in Telford.
02:36And we buy the aluminium extruded in.
02:38And it's a hand labour process to make the product.
02:41So where will these products be used then?
02:43What kind of situations is your flooring going to have?
02:46Like I said, public buildings, leisure, hospitality, retail, healthcare, supermarkets.
02:53Most shops and places you walk in will have a rigid mat in a mat well.
02:56And many of them are ours.
02:57Yeah.
02:58Wow.
02:59And is that design unique to yours, the kind of strips there?
03:03The profile that you can see there, the cross section,
03:07it's not unique to us but it's one we developed.
03:09We held the original paper for that in 1964.
03:12There are other competitors now,
03:14which is why our product range has expanded into other products like Newey Grid and Newey Connect.
03:19And I'm presuming it's ended up all over the country, the product?
03:22Not just this country.
03:24Also very big export markets as well.
03:27Yeah.
03:28Via agents, distributors and via our own forebore network which is global.
03:33So who is your biggest competitor doing what you do over here?
03:37Is there a number of people in the business?
03:39Yeah, there are a number.
03:40I wouldn't say who our biggest competitor is because it's a very competitive market,
03:45you know, selling entrance products.
03:47Yeah.
03:48Forebore is fairly unique in the industry in that we are a big portfolio seller.
03:54Yeah.
03:55So that we can go from a textile entrance to a rigid entrance to a carpet tile,
03:59onwards to a vinyl product to a luxury vinyl product.
04:02Cover the whole, yeah.
04:03So we basically sell from entrance to exit,
04:06whereas some of our competitors would just sell a mat.
04:09And as part of the centenary events, you've been having factory tours?
04:14Yeah, we're offering, you know, today people come round.
04:18We've had members of the council, members of press, you know, local interested parties.
04:22And on the 5th of October we have an open day for ex-employees, current employees, local community.
04:29And they'll get to see our history.
04:31Some slideshows, presentations from the social history of all the ex-employees
04:37and social activities, Christmas parties, rap races on the River Severn.
04:41Right.
04:42Those kind of things.
04:43And hopefully for us it's a chance to sort of put some names to faces
04:46from our extensive, you know, archive of photographs.
04:50So Simon, we're now on the shop floor.
04:52And what's your role here at New Way?
04:54So I am the operations manager for the site itself.
04:58Cool.
04:59Is it Forbo New Way? Is that how we say it?
05:01So New Way is a brand within the Forbo company.
05:05Yeah.
05:06So it's Forbo Flooring UK Limited.
05:08And you offer quite a unique tailored service, don't you?
05:12Just fill us in on kind of what it is you do here and, you know, that kind of customisation of it really.
05:19So we are a bespoke made to order business.
05:22So our orders, anything under 20 square metres is ordered on a Monday before dinner time.
05:27We'll be dispatched on a Friday before the end of shift.
05:30That's fantastic. That's a turnaround, isn't it? That's great.
05:33So what happens? You've got the rubber that's coming in offline there.
05:36You've got the, just talk us through the basic, the kind of five step process, if you will, as it comes in.
05:41So we manufacture our own rubber into rubber sheets.
05:45Then we make that into strips.
05:48We pierce and buff the rubber, which allows us to secure the mats together.
05:54We make our own wires, bend them to match the holes on the rubber.
06:00We also get our aluminium, which is cut to customer sizes, pierced with the same holes.
06:07And then we use the wires to secure the rubber and aluminium profiles together to make the mats.
06:14And then that's where we end up with this stage next to us.
06:17So this is the lads laying it out and getting ready to cut a specific shape to customer requirements.
06:23So what we have behind us is a template from the customer.
06:27So what's happened is the customer sends a template in.
06:30We mark out all the sizes for the mats to be made and manufactured.
06:35This is agreed with the customer that they're happy with it.
06:38We then manufacture the mats, bring them over to the shaping pad and pop them onto the floor.
06:43We then lay the template on top of the mats and mark out where the cuts are required.
06:48The guys then manufacture the mats to the correct sizes and shapes.
06:54They put them back on the floor and put the template on top to make sure that they match.
06:59Once this is done, the mats are put onto a pallet and wrapped, ready to go to the customer.
07:05How many people work here roughly on site?
07:08So there's 21 staff on site, that's staff and assembly workers included.
07:14Must be quite proud really, there's not many businesses that get to 100 years and are still going strong.
07:19Nice to be part of it.
07:21It's extremely, I'm proud to be a part of this.
07:25I'm a very small part of the New Age story, however, my team, some have been with the company up to 35 years,
07:32which is really, really impressive.
07:35Their care and attention and their love for the business and the products we make,
07:42we all have that amount of pride in what we do.
07:46I think this shows with the customer experience, we don't have more than half a percent a year in customer complaints.
07:54We try to make sure we do as much as we can on site to prevent any issues going to the customer.
08:01At least to another 100 years.
08:03Thank you very much.