Posted: 4th March 2020 | Back to news feed
Historic Leather Company Thrives After 2018 Customer Buyout
J & E Sedgwick Ltd, the historic leather company in Walsall, is thriving 16 months on from being bought out by its biggest customer, Abbey England Ltd along with partners, Crawford and Kilger, thereby saving a core business within the equestrian industry supply.
The company, which entered administration on 25th October 2018, was being wound up and staff were facing redundancy until the buyout along with a successful grant application and support from Walsall Council which allowed purchase of the building and business equipment enabled the company to continue trading and keep on 19 employees.
Abbey England’s ties with J & E Sedgwick go back a long way and, with substantial assets in business in Walsall as well as their Cheshire base, it was important to find a way to keep the leather company in business and trading successfully.
Following the takeover by the new owners, the focus of J & E Sedgwick was on returning the plant to full production along with catching up on back orders and reassuring customers that the business was there to stay and that the supply of Sedgwicks leather would continue.
From January 2019 to March 2019 the business was able to re-employ four staff members that had been made redundant under the control of the administrators. Also in January, Sedgwicks was represented on the Abbey England trade stand at the BETA International trade show 2019, which provided a great opportunity to talk to new and old customers and promote the fact that the company had survived the turmoil and was still around.
This was followed by a visit to the world’s leading leather trade show, the Asia Pacific Leather Fair (APLF) in Hong Kong to meet existing and potential new customers from the Far East.
By this time, leather was moving through the plant at a steady rate with the supply from the tannery back to normal levels.
At the SPOGA exhibition in Cologne, Germany, in September, a leather section on the Abbey England stand reinforced the fact that Sedgwicks was still here to the European market.
Said Phil Bevington, General Manager at J & E Sedgwick Ltd: “Over the summer of 2019 we were able to take on four new trainee staff members which is great news for the future of the business and ensures the passing on of skills that are unique to Sedgwicks to the next generation of workforce.”
“We have continued to add new export customers to our list and develop our ongoing partnership with Abbey England as our UK and European distributor. In addition a new distributor has been appointed for India and that remains a big part of our export sales.”
“I travelled with two of the company’s owners to Tokyo to see our Japanese distributor who is one of our top ten customers and on the same trip we visited Hong Kong to meet up with four customers from the Chinese region. Whilst Hong Kong has been in turmoil, the Chinese region remains a big opportunity to grow business for Sedgwicks.”
“Finally at the end of October we managed to get back to a six-to-eight week production time on our core range of products and colours. Overall it has been an exciting and busy year working to get Sedgwicks back to where it was and we now plan to grow the business in 2020 with existing and new customers along with product development and improved lead times.”
J & E Sedgwick Ltd processes and supplies English bridle leather to the trade and has a number of prestigious leather goods manufacturers among their customers.
For further information contact: Abbey England on 01565 650343 or visit www.abbeyengland.com
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