How to stay in business – for 325 years

THE chief executive of one of the oldest manufacturing firms in the region has spoken of her battle to keep alive rare skills in the Jewellery Quarter – in the hope that some work now done in China could return to the UK.

Fiona Toye, of military badge and regalia manufacturer Toye, Kenning & Spencer, said it made more sense for firms like hers to come together and work directly with schools and colleges to create the skills they needed.

The £8.5m business, established in 1685, employs around 140 people at its factories in Birmingham and Bedworth in Warwickshire. In this exclusive video interview with TheBusinessDesk.com, Mrs Toye talks about the secret behind the company’s longevity, the challenge of keeping highly specialist jobs in the UK, and the sense of duty involved in running a family business.

A tour of Toye, Kenning & Spencer’s labyrinthine factory in Warstone Lane in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter gives the visitor a case study of an historic business producing highly bespoke products for very specialist markets.
 
Regimental cap badges, school commemorative medals, Masonic pins or FA Charity Shield players’ medals – a bewildering variety of unique and complex jobs works its way through the factory every day of the year.

Short runs are the norm – much of the low-value mass production work is now outsourced to China. What remains is a complex and interlinked warren of workshops concentrating on toolmaking, die-stamping, enamelling, electroplating and finishing. Many intricate processes can only be carried out by hand, in much the same way they have been for centuries. Others are similarly highly skilled, but now have precision, computer-aided technology at their core. Many orders require all of these processes to brought to bear, often completed with TK&S’s famous ribbon weaved at its factory in Bedworth.

Mrs Toye is only too aware of how much the business relies on such an array of rare and specialist skills. New approaches to training, and talking directly to schools and young people is the key she said:

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In order to stay in business over more than 300 years, Toye, Kenning & Spencer has been nothing if not flexible and innovative. But exporting jobs to China and maintaining high value work in the UK is a fine balance, and Mrs Toye thinks there is even a chance that some work might return to the UK as costs increase in the developing world.

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Finally, running a family business is clearly more than a day job. Here, Mrs Toye explains the sense of duty  that comes with being the custodian of Toye, Kenning & Spencer, and the importance of family firms to the UK economy.

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