What sets Wrekin Products apart?
We genuinely feel we are market leaders in terms of volume and turnover, but also in our innovation and knowledge of the problems our customers have and how to solve them. Our customers like working with us because we always know about the next big thing.
How did your involvement in civil engineering products begin?
It started with my father, Stan, who bought into a cast iron company in the 1990s, which sold pipes to the water industry but was looking to expand into the manhole cover market.
This led to the purchase of a firm called Wrekin Welding and Fabric Engineering Ltd, which made steel manhole covers, in 1996. The company was named after the famous Wrekin hill, in Shropshire.
Then, in around 2000, my dad sold his business to an American company and stayed on board. I’d joined from university and then we basically did a management buy-out of the small Wrekin part of the company.
Exciting times for the family, then. Had you always wanted to be involved?
That wasn’t my initial plan! I’d just finished an environmental degree at Newcastle University, followed by an MBA, and was looking at interviews elsewhere. I wasn’t thinking of coming here but I started with a summer job in sales – and then we ended up buying out the business and that was it.
Did the Wrekin business really take off after the management buy-out?
Our turnover was £2.5m in 2001 and we decided to steadily focus on iron manhole covers and steel fabrications, growing the business to around £10m in 2012/13.
Then, after a restructure, the team oversaw some rapid growth. COVID-19 aside, by the end of the 2020, we had reached a turnover of around £43m.
What made the difference to the company’s growth?
We changed the focus of how we took our products to market. We changed from simply being a trading company to seeing ourselves very much as a manufacturer. We spent a lot of time and resources on designing manhole covers that can solve the failure mechanisms you find in highways projects.
A lot of the investment in recent years has been heavily focused on iron manhole covers. But we also have very strong capabilities around steel covers and geosynthetics. They are our three main specialisms.