BRITISH MANUFACTURING
Founder Andrew Ritchie with Brompton
production line stalwarts Brompton: Silver anniversary
Brompton has been celebrating 25 years of full-time manufacturing by sharing a cake on the production line, but how did the famous British brand get from loan rejection letters in its early days to becoming the kind of brand that gets visits from royalty? Jonathon Harker interviews managing director Will Butler-Adams…
THE RICH AND POWERFUL are no strangers to Brompton’s Kew Bridge HQ. His Royal Highness Prince Phillip, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Business Secretary Vince Cable have all paid the British folding bike company a visit. One of whom, trivia fans may note, forgot to change his safety shoes after the factory visit so a staffer had to pedal across London to re- acquaint him with his ones and twos. While those famous faces were visiting they
may well have paid the walls of Brompton HQ more than a brief glance to discover a treasure trove of company tit-bits. Not only does Brompton proudly display its three Queen’s Awards (for Enterprise and Export Achievement), but the wry company has also framed letters of rejection from yesteryear, from bike companies unsure of Brompton’s potential and unwilling to take it on back in the ‘70s, to the banks that refused to loan it the cash it needed to take production up to the next level in its formative years. Stepping into the illustrious shoes of Clegg,
Cable, et al (perhaps literally), BikeBiz is paying Brompton HQ a visit on the occasion of its 25th anniversary of manufacturing. Brompton is rarely mentioned without acknowledging the
BIKEBIZ.COM
The Brompton MD astride his own over-a- decade-old folder
fact the British brand manufactures in the UK. Taking BikeBiz on a tour of the factory, managing director Will Butler-Adams explains that part of the reason the folding bike firm manufactures here is that it has been founded on intellectual property. From the bikes themselves to creating manufacturing tools virtually from scratch, it’d be hard – nay impossible – to make an accurate copy of a Brompton if you were a rival manufacturer. Constantly refining techniques and innovating processes in-house means more schematics and design has gone into the tools that create the bikes than the bikes themselves…meaning getting hold of similar tools to produce a copy would be inordinately tricky.
In the beginning Founder Andrew Ritchie – he who received all those rejection letters in Brompton’s formative years – is now technical director for the firm, with day-to-day operations headed up for the last 12 years by Butler-Adams. “Andrew created a fantastic business and a
fantastic product,” Butler-Adams tells BikeBiz. “He’s a complete legend but his weakness is that he likes to do everything himself and isn’t
so good at delegation. So when more people came to work for Brompton he ended up being busier than ever and actually signing everything off himself. “We’re both engineers, but I was brought in to come at things from a different angle. I look at strategy and potential – and there is huge potential still for Brompton. There really is.” Brompton has come a long way from the
days of those rejection letters, now having produced 300,000 bikes over the 25 years of production. Butler-Adams cites Ritchie’s decision to move the company to Kew Bridge – the present site in 1998 – as one of the biggest milestones. “There was 22 or so staff at the time so it was an enormously confident to move into so large a space. We’ve been able to expand into it and we’ve not had to worry about the logistics of a move as we’ve grown – so that forward thinking decision has allowed us to stay focused on the business.” The story goes that the surplus area of the
factory used to be used as a makeshift indoor football pitch for staff, but now there’s precious little room for an impromptu game of footie with over 200 employees working at the site. In that time the company has gone from
BIKEBIZ JANUARY 31
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