• • • EDITOR’S INTERVIEW • • • At your service
The family behind the Niglon brand is celebrating 80 years in business. Simon King sat down with Oliver Hinley, Niglon’s operations director, to find out more about the business
T
he business, which now supplies more than 4,500 products to wholesalers across the UK, can trace its roots back to 1943 when Stanley Douglas Hinley began working as a manufacturer’s agent, under the trading name S D Hinley. At that time, he made a commission selling products from Cryselco, Grelco and Contactum. Oliver Hinley, Niglon’s operations director and
Stanley’s great grandson, said: “When you’re a good agent, you end up losing the agency eventually, because agents are expensive relative to salespeople.
“Niglon was started in 1966 as an own brand company. To begin with, the agencies carried on alongside, but the company also started bringing in a range of products. It started as a non-brand business to prevent my grandfather losing his living. “We’re a fourth generation, family company, which is quite different to the way some larger companies work. We’re a tight team and we tend to have a really low staff turnover.” Oliver and his brother Jake joined the family business in 2012.
“I still work with my father, Simon Hinley; he’s the managing director and still comes in half a day a week,” Oliver said. “My brother’s here and my sister worked here for a time, so it’s a proper family business.”
Niglon employs 38 staff and Oliver said the USP of the business is service and offering a good service has been a growth driver.
“I’d love to have a catalogue full of patented products, but we don’t – we have to sell ourselves on our service,” Oliver said. “We can’t always be the cheapest, although we try and be competitive.” Niglon moved to a new building in 2015, a purpose-built distribution hub, which, Oliver said, improved service levels massively.
“In the last three or four years we’ve implemented a lot of systems within the business which are all aimed at getting the product to the customer quickly, without errors, at a competitive price, and everything that goes behind that to achieve that,” he said.
In 2017, Niglon had more than 600 product lines in its portfolio; today it has more than 4,500 products. “Every single product that we list in our standard catalogue is stocked,” Oliver said. “There’s lots of bread-and-butter items, and we cover so many different product categories. “We’ve won some quite strong business in the last 12/18 months on the basis of carrying some of these switch fuses and busbars that a lot of the bigger boys are quoting very long lead times for – that’s where it comes down to service and having it on the shelf.”
Niglon measures itself on being on-time and delivered in full. “If we haven’t got it in stock, we’ve failed the customer,” Oliver said. “Wholesalers don’t keep the stock in this kind of depth. so they rely increasingly on the distributor to have the stock. “Going back about five years, our standard
delivery time used to be three to five days; it’s now one to two days as standard and increasingly customers expect next day.” The majority of Niglon’s business is in the UK, but it does have some customers in Ireland. Most of our sales are in the UK and we do have some customers in Ireland. “We have 800 customers over 2,500 branches,” Oliver said. “We deal with all the buying groups; we’re an established known name and we deal with most wholesalers to some degree.” With the changes in the industry, Oliver said the challenge is to retain that level of technical knowledge.
“Getting good people is always hard, that’s why you’ve got to keep the good ones and develop the one in the business that want the extra responsibility,” he said. “The last 12/18 months after COVID have been
very difficult from a recruitment point of view. I don’t see that getting any easier, because where are people that going to come from? “We’ve got some good people here, and we tend to take our time in recruiting for a position. It is a challenge, as people are the core of the business. If you haven’t got the right people in place, you’re asking for problems.”
Oliver said that Niglon has got some strong growth targets over the next 18 months.
16 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • FEBRUARY 2023
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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