A HOLME Valley company will remain in safe hands following a buy-out of the business.
Husband and wife Norman and Hilary Berry have sold their stakes in Burton Safes – the Brockholes-based firm they founded 20 years ago – to fellow directors Jeremy Elson and Ben Lewis. The couple will leave the business next week when they retire to pursue other interests.
And the new owners have set out plans for further steady growth at the firm which employs 18 people and supplies a wide range of safes and security products to customers in the UK and Ireland.
Mr Berry began his working life in textiles and was involved in the industry for 16 years.
He graduated in textile sciences at Leeds University before working at rug manufacturer Edmund Field and Sons where he rose to become production director running the mill.
He left in 1981 and together with Hilary ran a payroll service and computer bureau from home in Kirkburton.
Mr Berry later landed a job as a commission-only salesman covering Yorkshire and Lancashire for a company selling safes. On January 19, 1990, the Berrys branched out on their own by setting up Burton Safes which operated from the garage at their Kirkburton home before they got a warehouse in Honley.
The business moved to Brockholes in 1999 since when it has expanded from two units at Brockholes Business Park to occupy nine units. It has increased sales every year since and achieved turnover of £2.7m in its most recent annual results.
Mr Lewis joined the company in June 2000 after graduating from Newcastle University to cover sales in southern England while Mr Elson, a graduate from the University of North Wales, was appointed the following year.
Burton Safes, which began importing in 1999, now imports products made in Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain and China.
Although many of the safes are ‘standard’, others are built to Burton’s designs and all of them are ‘badged’ with the Burton name and livery.
The company supplies products including free-standing safes, underfloor and wall safes, key safes, gun cabinets, hotel safes and strongboxes. It is also at the forefront of latest technology with safes that can be accessed via the internet or make use of biometric information such as fingerprints.
In 2006 the company came top in a product testing survey carried out by consumer magazine Which?
“We have grown tremendously during the past 20 years,” said Mr Berry.
“We supply the trade rather than the end-user – locksmiths, internet dealers and safe engineers – but our products finish up with some big names including high street retailers and banks.”
Speaking about the new owners’ plans for the business, Mr Elson said: “In the short-term we aim to continue the steady growth of the company, but we are also looking into related areas such as fire protection, Government markets and strong rooms for banks and pharmaceutical firms.
“We want to be the UK’s biggest safe supplier and grow internationally. We are looking to refresh the range in the spring with a redesign of our most successful commercial product line.”
Mr Lewis added: “We have a very big range in the market compared to our competitors so we are looking at specialist areas such as strong rooms and new safes aimed at the retail market. They include ‘note-validation’ equipment which can provide retailers with information about how much money is in the safe and which staff have handled the transactions, helping to combat internal fraud and enabling them to arrange calls by the security vans more efficiently.”
