National Awards the Next Stop for High-Flying Grantham Business
Staff at leading Lincolnshire sign manufacturer Viking Signs will find out on Thursday (27th January) if theirs is the UK’s best small manufacturing business.
The Grantham-based firm won a place at the national Make UK Manufacturing Awards when it was named Make UK Midlands & East SME of the Year in October last year.
Managing Director Darren Joint will be at the awards dinner at East Wintergarden, London on Thursday to find out if Viking Signs has won the national award, along with his parents and company founders Simon and Michele Joint.
“Winning the Midlands and East Manufacturing SME of the Year was a fantastic achievement for the whole Viking Signs team,” he said.
“To be considered as a national winner of this prestigious Make UK award is a huge endorsement of all the hard work my team has put in over the last few years and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of them!
“We believe that our manufacturing on demand model offers huge advantages in terms of speed, service, choice and contribution to achieving net zero. If being shortlisted and maybe even winning this award gives us a platform to share these advantages with our UK manufacturing peers then it’s a double win for us.”
Since he became MD in 2007 Darren has grown Viking Signs 20-fold and the business now offers the UK’s largest range of safety signs, manufacturing more than 50,000 signs and labels every month on demand, for free next day delivery.
Viking Signs, a pioneer in lean, on-demand manufacturing, is also a supplier of sign, label and engraved components to many other local Lincolnshire and national manufacturers with a website specifically designed for these customers: https://www.vikingmanufacturing.co.uk/
Make UK is the manufacturers’ organisation for the UK. To find out more about the national awards visit https://www.makeuk.org/news-and-events/awards-and-competitions/manufacturing-awards.
Watch the video here and follow the awards on social media using the hashtag #MakeUKAwards.
Notes for editors:
About Viking Signs:
● Viking Signs is an example to other manufacturing SMEs of the power of lean, digital on-demand manufacturing methods, combined with strong, ethical values and a supportive, inclusive team environment which brings together the best of systematic, corporate-style process thinking, with dynamic entrepreneurial nimbleness.
● Simon and Michele Joint bought the tiny business in 1997, and their son Darren joined in 2006. Together they launched their own in-house volume manufacturing capabilities. Darren and Simon had both experienced the power of lean on-demand manufacturing and were convinced that this could be applied to the traditional screen printed safety sign sector, so in 2007 the safetysignsupplies
‘digital factory’ was born.
● The growth of e-commerce combined with consumer demand for rapid delivery of a vast choice resulted in growth for the business, from £150k in 2006 to £1m turnover in 2016.
● The firm was approached by Amazon in 2017 to become a supplier because of its huge product range (then 35,000 SKUs). Although a stretch for the team at the time, the move resulted in a huge increase in volume and Viking Signs broke through the £1m turnover ceiling.
● In the first three weeks of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020 Viking Signs designed, created and launched more than 20,000 brand new safety sign products for the new social distancing requirement. These include several symbols and designs which have now become ubiquitous and adopted as the industry standards.
● By May 2020 this rapid product creation had resulted in more than 3.5 times normal demand – mainly for brand new social distancing products. Throughout this period the Viking team showed huge resilience, flexibility and commitment, switching to extended shifts, strategic investments in new processes and new ways to optimise output and solving old problems which had caused historical inefficiencies. Viking Signs ended 2020 with more than 120,000 SKUs (stock keeping units, or part numbers, used by manufacturers to reference unique products) and turnover had nearly doubled.
● MD Darren Joint is the Chair of the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership Manufacturing Board and a founding member of both the Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire Manufacturing Networks.
About Make UK:
● Make UK is the manufacturers’ organisation in the UK. It champions and celebrates British manufacturing and manufacturers, building a platform for the evolution of UK manufacturing.
● More information about the MAKE UK Manufacturing Awards can be found here: https://www.makeuk.org/news-and-events/awards-and-competitions/manufacturing-awards
For media information, please contact:
