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Business News


payout, and help from sympathetic sources such as the bank manager, Birmingham City Council’s estates manager and neighbouring factories, the firm held on to complete its move to its home in Green Lane. Today, the future looks as bright


as the gleaming china and glass products which adorn Heritage Collection’s showrooms at HQ. Nearly £1 million is being ploughed into a factory extension, with another six workers being recruited. Anthony stresses that innovation


Classy collection: An example of the tableware firm’s work


Libyan dictator’s inner sanctum, where Gaddafi placed his order, but the sales coup never materialised, despite a bizarre compromise attempt to convert the deal into 100,000 tins of cat food. “We couldn’t get the money, there were no letters of credit we could do.” Martin’s personal sales touch may


have – understandably - come unstuck in the unlikely settings of Gaddafi’s desert hideout, but it hasn’t deterred him from driving through prestige deals with luxury hotels and the like for half a century or so. For decades the Birmingham firm has quietly upheld the best traditions of West Midlands


manufacturing, and son Anthony proudly produces a framed newspaper cutting revealing how they won a £110,000 contract for more than 63,000 items of hand- finished cutlery for the opening of the ICC in the early 1990s. Says Anthony: “We are not into


market share, we are not into volume per se. We are into achieving great partnerships with the very top hospitality venues. “We supply the ones that want


to be different and stand out. But we also supply the butcher down the road, a garden centre at Lichfield. We are not here to say we only deal with the elite.”


Like any company over such a


long period since its foundation, Heritage Collection has had its tough times, notably when a fire accidentally started by a careless employee’s discarded cigarette end destroyed the firm’s previous premises in Small Heath. Martin remembers: “Overnight we


lost everything, we could have closed down. It was the lowest point – it was also the most important moment when you find a couple of people who are real friends who reach out and say ‘we will help.’” Fortunately, the firm was by then


investing in new premises in Small Heath. With the aid of an insurance


remains key to the firm’s future. “From day one, we have embraced innovation, because our parents had the foresight to understand that you cannot stand still. We call it doing high-quality craft in an innovative and relevant way.” His father’s enduring enthusiasm


underpins that ethos. After all, this is a man who, with wife Mireille, launched a tableware firm in Waterford on his honeymoon. “We got married in Paris in


November 1973 and then flew to Ireland and started Waterford Silver. We had one of the most interesting honeymoons.” With that sort of work ethic, Heritage Collection can look forward to many more decades supplying the elite and the humble, if not Colonel Gaddafi.


April 2020 CHAMBERLINK 17


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