Getley | MANUFACTURER PROFILE
Getley: key facts l Founded by Mark and Emanuela Getley in 2015 l Paul Bryan promoted from operations director to MD in 2019 l Number of employees: 67 l Turnover 2020/21: £7 million (est) l Current production: 93 kitchens / 1,200 cabinets per week l Current retailer base: 300, with 180 ordering every month l New Hixon factory adds 13,000sq ft and will ramp up production to 140 kitchen a week, or 2,000 cabinets
The new Hixon factory is expected to be operational by the end of January
wonder, then, that its existing factory was struggling to keep up, and this is why we are visiting Getley again now [early December 2021] to have a look around its new 13,000sq ft factory in nearby Hixon. Why there? Because it was not possible to extend the existing factory in Stafford and because there was nothing suitable any closer.
Bespoke The new factory will have all the CNC machines and edge banders you would expect to find, as well as its own spraying facility, but it will also have a full set of joinery machines that will allow it to manufacture its own doors, in-fill panels, corner posts, mouldings, cornices and pelmets that the more
January 2022 ·
bespoke Alku range will need. We had hoped to see a fully operational factory as much as Getley had hoped to have one by the time of our visit. Unfortunately, the worldwide semiconductor shortage meant that supply of the machines they needed was delayed, and so there were a few empty spaces on the factory floor where new machinery should have been. Getley is now expecting the factory to be fully operational by the end of January. On the plus side, it does help to show the scale of the new manufacturing facility.
As CEO Mark Getley explains: “The new site will be focused around Alku. And it will be manufacturing Alku cabinets, Alku doors and we will have
our own spraying facilities there.” And it will also offer more bespoke capabilities. Marketing director Dan Hughes elaborates: “The new factory has a lot more bespoke manufacturing capability. We have spindle moulders and everything that we need to manufacture very bespoke items that are more geared to what the Alku brand is all about. It’s a more complete offering rather than relying on XYZ manufacturers to supply us with items. If we see a gap in the market, we can prototype it, manufacture it at that site and then we can spray it any colour we like. We control the direction we want to go.” Traditional in-frame and lay-on shaker kitchens are something that
British manufacturers have specialised in and something that’s different from what the German manufacturers offer. And so Getley sees Alku as sitting perfectly alongside the German offering for customers who do not want a modern slab-style kitchen. “Where we sit is alongside the Germans,” says Hughes. “We want to complement studios that to this point have been solus German and are looking for traditional in-frame and lay-on shaker kitchens. We are not looking for them to replace modern slab doors with ourselves. “German kitchens are very well made, you can’t knock them. But because we aren’t the behemoths they are, we can respond much „
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