This may seem a topical post at the moment with the current news on Brexit, it is however relevant to us at Cre8tive Interiors. We note with interest what is going on, as we only use UK suppliers and have done for the last 20 years, whatever happens will not affect our projects. Made in Britain products are important to us.
Our background in Engineering and Manufacturing has meant we are very much supportive of British Manufacturing, over the last 20 years we have always thought of where product is made. We have experience of a competitor of ours that won a project against us using an imported office furniture product a few years ago. It was for around 30 workstations where the supplier was overseas and they had a manufacturing problem in supply. There were some technical issues with some of the parts of the desk frame not going together properly. Due to the distance and language problems it took 6 weeks to get replacement parts which put the contractor out of business. Just this last year we have also been made aware of one of our suppliers having problems with parts coming from within the EU. In our view there is always a potential supply issue using overseas manufactured product. Parts may be cheaper but risky to use in our view. All the product we supply is made in the UK, in the unlikely event of something going wrong we can get things sorted quickly. Sometimes problems do happen, we did have an issue last year with an install but it was resolved the same day, so the customer was not actually affected at all and was none the wiser.
We do not know what will happen with trade, the potential barriers with customs, or duties to any imported item at this time so we do not think this makes much sense in using overseas suppliers just for those reasons alone.
Combined with the uncertainties of Brexit, exchange rate, import duties and the length of the supply chain we will definitively not be changing our made in the UK policy on manufactured goods supplied to our customers. It was never going to change anyway, Brexit or not.