The Big Interview Entering a new chapter
Over the last 18 months, Amaya Sales UK has opened two brand new showrooms. The first opened in Nottingham in June 2020 and comprises three separate showrooms with one dedicated to Kornit Digital, including a micro factory workflow set-up. The second opened in Havant in October and houses all of Amaya’s kit offering. P&P editor Melanie Attlesey was invited to an open day to find out more about Amaya’s growth in recent years and plans for the future.
O
n my visit to Amaya’s new facility in Havant in early November, I was
pleasantly surprised by just how welcoming, airy and modern the showroom felt.
Any visitor who is either looking to get started in garment decoration or is just looking to expand their set-up will find a helpful team of experts on hand in both locations to offer their advice and to demonstrate equipment ranging from Melco embroidery machines to UV printers, with a few heat presses in between.
The opening of the two showrooms, warehousing and office space has nearly tripled Amaya’s footprint. A lot of work and effort has gone into making these spaces not just your average showroom, but a place where visitors can feel at home and view the equipment in an operational setting, while at the same time receive advanced training on equipment and consumables that they currently use in their day-to-day businesses.
We are family
No doubt, the team at Amaya will be familiar names and faces to many of our readers. The company is very much family-run and family values lie at the heart of the company ethos. With each team member treated like family, along with each and every customer. Four people are involved with the day-to-day running of Amaya. At the head of the family is Peter Wright, Amaya’s managing director. Having worked with embroidery machines for over 40 years, from his early years as a technician, there isn’t anything he doesn’t know about the equipment. He formed Amaya Sales UK in 2003 when he began to distribute the new Melco 16 needle modular embroidery machine to the UK market. Peter realised very early
| 48 | January 2022
on that digital print was to become a very integral part of the business to support Amaya’s growing customer base. And so, Amaya became an early adopter of direct to garment print technology, when it was in its infancy around 15 years ago. Peter’s son Julian joined the family business in 2003. Now working as the company’s sales director, it is his role to evaluate what equipment is right for their customers and what will be the most effective, regardless of whether they are a start-up business working out of their home or garage or a large company focusing on mass customisation. “It’s about finding that solution for them and that’s how we partner with our customers,” says Julian. The financial director is Charlotte Darling, although she is anything but. Both Peter and Julian joke that it is Charlotte that really runs the Amaya ship. It was in 2010 that Charlotte first became involved with Amaya. Her own experience stems from retailing, printing T shirts and textiles. She first printed a T shirt with her dad at the age of 12 in her family’s chain of retail shops, which specialised in stock transfer designs being printed on-demand in front of customers. She quickly became an asset to the growing business.
The fourth member of the management team is John Harrison. Recently promoted to technical director, he has worked with Peter since the age of 16 as an apprentice and has seen every possible change in the garment decoration industry over the last two decades. “We are a team of experts,” says Charlotte. “We come in all different shapes and sizes, but it’s a high level of experience that everyone has got here in the products that we sell.” “While our background is in
embroidery, we have been involved with DTG from the very first year effectively,” says Peter. Charlotte adds: “So when people talk about expertise, we’ve had the expertise from the very beginning.”
Developed and expanded Over the years, Amaya has developed and expanded its product range to suit the garment decoration industry. This has included the addition of Polyprint Texjet DTG printers, Oki white toner printers and Forever transfer papers, Kornit Digital DTG systems and most recently, a selection of UV and print and cut machines from Roland DG. Peter says adding Roland to the product line-up was the final piece in the jigsaw. The team have to stand behind the equipment that they offer and believe
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk Amaya’s Havant team
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