Company History

The company was originally started by Michael Whiles in 1978 when he used his tool making skills to start making some small batches of engineering parts for a friend who struggled to find anyone to make small batches locally. The next step in the story is a familiar one for many small business owners. As the work gradually started to build, Mike found he was spending more hours in evenings and weekends making parts at home than he was dedicating to his full-time day job. He took the brave leap and decided to quit his day job in order to fully dedicate his time to making engineering parts.Moving from his garage to a small unit leased at the back of a Tadley Transport yard the business continued to grow with the next milestone arriving when a customer whom he had just made a mould tool for, asked if we could also then run it for him making plastic parts. Mike started making the first parts for John Cox the MD of PC Cox in the mid 80’s. As they started converting many of their pressed steel or die-cast parts into plastic the cost savings and technical benefits of the plastic parts compared to die cast ones saw the two companies flourish over the next 25 years.

Mike being an engineer at heart realised the value in investing in newer machinery and continually ploughed his hard-earned funds back into the company to enable its growth from having 3 very old moulding machines to 10 much newer ones. This expansion on the Tadley Transport site saw the business moving from a small 450 sqft Nissen unit into a 5000 sqft steel clad factory unit.

The next business milestone arrived when Mike was looking for free hold premises at the same time as the transport company that owned his unit were looking to sell the land to a local supermarket. The timing was perfect and enabled Mike to move to our current premises in 1996. By this time his son Paul was already involved in the business and had taken over the running of the toolmaking department. Shortly after the Millennium in 2001 Mike’s other son Steve joined the business to help run the production side of things.

The new production site was 17,000sq ft split across two buildings but with the addition of a dedicated toolmaking and tool storage building in 2013 this has seen expansion to nearly 20,000 sq ft. Despite this growth the founding values of the business are still very much intact and at the forefront of everything we do; building long-term business relationships based on trust and great value.

As injection moulding specialists we still take ownership of our customers project from initial drawings to finished product which enables them to dedicate their time to their own business challenges. We still recognise the value of investing in the latest machinery as the improved quality and efficiencies benefit both us and our clients. As testament to this on-going support for our customers, we still have mould tools in use which Mike made over 40 years ago and many of our clients kindly view us as their injection moulding department rather than an external supplier.