Barkley Plastics celebrates six decades of manufacturing in Birmingham

A Birmingham-based plastic injection moulding and toolmaking specialist is celebrating a big birthday in style after securing a string of exciting new projects. Barkley Plastics, which marks 60 years of business later this month, has won work to produce controller parts and ambient lighting for a luxury high-end shower manufacturer, as well as car charger components for Fast Amps and environmentally friendly plumbing fittings for Ecoclip.

These latest ‘wins’ – combined with its own ‘PlasFloor’ flooring tile range and ongoing interior trim and specialist lighting products orders from Nissan, Toyota, JLR and several supercar manufacturers – have helped the company bounce back from a difficult two years. The firm is now on course to turn over more than £4 million and has plans in place to increase revenues further by 2026.

Expansion plans have been boosted by the £100,000 modernisation and streamlining of its Highgate facility to include several collaborative robots (cobots) for increased automation and a new temperature-controlled quality control room that houses two co-ordinate measurement machines (CMMs) and a vision scope system.

“Since Covid-19 there’s been a lot of supply chain disruption and the automotive sector has been extremely volatile in terms of volumes,” explains Matt Harwood, who took over as Managing Director from his father Mark in 2022. “Like before in our 60-year history, we’ve chosen to face these challenges head-on and are now in a position to target a significant amount of reshoring work that directly suits our technical plastic moulding expertise and the fact we have our own onsite toolroom.”

He continues: “It’s a great achievement to last six decades in manufacturing and we’ve seen some interesting times. What’s stood out has been the passion of our staff to deliver the best service to customers. This is typified by the fact we have six members of our 53-strong workforce who’ve been with us for more than 30 years.

“Now that we’ve refined our factory and increased efficiency, we’re in a perfect position to offer competitive prices and are determined to help bring more production back to the UK.”

Barkley Plastics, which holds ISO9001 quality and ISO14001 environmental accreditations, produces high-precision tools capable of delivering millions of mouldings for distribution throughout the UK, mainland Europe and across the world.

With a fully equipped toolmaking facility within its moulding plant, the company can support its client base with initial design and product development, right through to manufacture and assembly. Barkley Plastics has over 30 modern moulding presses – ranging from 5 to 650 tonne – for producing intricate components weighing less than a gram right up to parts that measure a metre squared and weigh up to 2.5 kg.

Steve Smith, Operations Director at Barkley Plastics, says: “The new contract with the luxury shower manufacturer is a perfect example of where we come into our own. We breathed new life into some of its near-obsolete tooling, which gave them the confidence to give us the challenge of developing technical components and ambient lighting for their new product ranges. We quickly proved we could manufacture it to the quality and aesthetic finish required and, importantly, at a cost point that worked for them. I’m sure this would have gone overseas before we stepped in.”

Barkley Plastics is keen to reduce its carbon footprint and is currently working with partners on developing new moulding technologies that reduce energy usage and cycle times, not to mention a net-zero project with WMG that helped it insulate some of its larger moulding machines.