Member Article

New premises to double headcount for Hartlepool furniture firm Top Brass

Furniture business Top Brass, which provides everything from blinds to beds to complete furnished rooms, has revealed it will relocate to a new base in Hartlepool this September.

Expanding to 30,000sq ft premises at Oaksway Industrial Estate, a rapid increase in orders will see the firm occupy a facility four times the size of its current base at Longhill Industrial Estate.

Director John Harrington, who is relocating to Hartlepool with his family from London where the business has a head office, also revealed that the business will double its workforce reflecting its growth.

He said: “Our growth has been a real success story so far and has been aided by the decision to locate in Hartlepool where we find the myriad of skills and talents we need.”

Top Brass: The story so far

With backing from Hartlepool Borough Council and the Regional Growth Fund’s Let’s Grow initiative, John and the management team at Top Brass have invested heavily in both machinery and staff and have seen the order book flourish as a result.

“When we started off with just two of us, we relied on word of mouth to raise our profile. But then we won two £2m orders for beds with a big hotel chain, and that led to other contracts coming in from franchises.

“We can fit out refurbs or new build hotels from scratch. If you think about it the bed is the most important aspect for any hotel. You can have the facilities and the views and everything else that we all like in a hotel, but if someone has a poor night’s sleep because the bed isn’t right then they won’t go back.

“We pride ourselves on providing that quality, and everything else we do to furnish the rooms is of an equally high standard.

““We have invested not just in our workforce, but in our machinery as well. We service a service industry, so everything has to be spot on. You can’t invest in staff without the right tools, and vice versa.”

In previous years Top Brass would outsource various components to create pieces of furniture, but now everything is done at the Hartlepool base and John added: “The hotel will have a concept for a design, we will look at it and advise how we can alter it to make it more cost-effective.

“We can then provide every single item, from the bed to the headboard to the bedside tables and other pieces. The client appreciates the fact we are effectively a one-stop shop who can provide everything they need, and we get a lot of repeat business from that.”