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Saddest news of the day
After more than 200 years as a successful sign manufacturer Pearce Signs called in the Administrators today.
Nick Pearce sent a statement to the organisers of Sign UK and I believe the announcement was made at the show. Whilst the appointment of administrators doesn’t necessarily mean that receivership is imminent I can’t help but think that this is a very sad day for the sign industry. I just hope that some way of saving the business can be found but feel that suppliers, customers and rival companies will scent blood in the water and a £20 million turnover business will end up having its bones picked over by creditors and competitors.
It’s not only the people employed by Pearce that will be affected, this part of Kent has a very strong sub contract manufacturing industry a lot of which relies on Pearce for at least a part of its turnover. Let’s just hope the business can be saved.
I, and probably quite a few others on the boards spent a good chunk of time working for Pearce and to think that 207 years of sign-making could be about to bite the dust makes me rather sad. 😥
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14 Replies
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Well I’ll get to view their accountants, I’m on their list of creditors! It won’t cause me any agro, it’s not a lot.
I did a lot of work for Pearce Signs Scotland for a good few years, but they shut last year. It has been on the cards for a while and comes as no surprise. It’s a shame.
I’m sure Nick Pearce will lose no sleep over this, his pockets will be well lined. -
I know many of the guys who work there, it is sad, because many wont find employment in the industry around here. Nothing to do with the standard of thier work, but thats the way things are going.
I will also see a copy of the accounts, as im also a creditor, but i know several smaller companies in the area are going to find things even harder, as they have been doing loads of work from them!
What i find odd, they have just moved into a “new” factory, after selling a lot of land, loads of new machines, and more so, loads of work!
I guess we will find out soon enough though.
It also brings home the fact that, even the biggest can fall, but when they do, normally its a big one.
🙁
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it is a sad thing when the big established companies go, its a trend that has continued for some years now.
is it an indication of how the sign trade in general seems to be heading?
small, working from the spare room type set ups?
i hope not but as we are all awre competition is fierce. i was having this very conversation today with a 20 year old esatblished sign company who are talking of re locating due to 7 new ‘sign companies’ appearing around them in the last 18mths!!it would be a sad thing for signs to becomes so worthless in their production due to price wars at the retail end.
even at the sign show which i managed to arrive at today for the last couple of hours, everyone seems to be selling everyone elses equipment/products re branded as their own,
nothing unique, just firece competitionjust my thoughts
good luck to all involved with Pearce
Kevin
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Pearce pocketed £8m from the sale of their factory last year…. where did it go.. Nicks pocket? They made a profit last month apparently (perhaps by not paying their suppliers like me), the first for a long time.
As for ‘spare room sign companies’ – don’t slag us off. When Pearce Signs infrastructure couldn’t handle a nationwide rebranding, they asked for my help. Within 3 weeks I had provided them with 8000 temporary signs that Thannet with all it’s capacity was unable to produce. ‘Spare room sign companies’ like myself do so to keep overheads low, by choice. That’s why I’m still here, a £20m turnover is OK if you’re making profit. But if you’re not then who’s daft!!! I’ve worked from home for 12 years, I’ve never forced prices down. It’s survival of the fittest – you carry dead weight and you feel it.
The people I feel sorry for are ex Pearce employees who will lose their pension if a liquidator is appointed before the end of the month.
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Marcella, Pearce sold their factory to Homebase for £7 million but apparently they only pocketed £5 million because the other £2 million was held back due tot the fact that Pearce didn’t vacate and clear the building as they were meant to.
That money was gobbled up very quickly converting their ‘new’ factory from a furniture factory into a sign manufacturing factory amongst other things.
The biggest problem for Pearce IMHO was their choice of market sector – they have lost a large section of the retail and banking business and pursued forecourt work and are currently working for Shell, Texaco, Jet and Esso. History has proved that this has been a difficult market to do well at as a UK manufacturer (Collins Signs, A C Edwards, ACME Signs are all part of signmaking history now) as you’re constantly competing with manufacturers in low cost base countries like Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic.
‘Spare room’ sign companies are an important part of the industry and I don’t think that anyone should belittle their work or input to the trade as a whole and apologise if it sounded like I was.
There are all sorts of rumours circulating at the moment about what the outcome of the administration will be – personally I hope that some way of saving the business can be found but blood is in the water now and the sharks have already started to come out……watch this space I guess.
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quote Vinny@Phoenix:What i find odd, they have just moved into a “new” factory, after selling a lot of land, loads of new machines, and more so, loads of work!🙁
Mate, being aussie based I have no idea who these guys are. We have had our share of companies that have gone under here too, after appearing hugely busy and successful.
My accountant tells me that the biggest downfall of these bigger companies is that they are asset rich, but cash poor. Companies in that position can only operate with a good cash flow. If that slows, or someone defaults on them, that is when the rot sets in.
It is a good lesson for even us little guys. It is all and well having the latest and greatest machines, and big corporate accounts, but if they don’t pay on time, and the cash flow drys up, we will all end up at the same point.
My sister manages a $5m a month company. The most important person on her staff, she says, is the account controller. If they are not on the ball, making sure accounts are collected on time, money dries up real fast.
Hope all the affected by this come thru OK.
Cheers
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Many years ago, i work for Oldham signs they were the biggest at the time in the UK, two huge factories…. doing work for all the big blue chip companies, but they went down, First staff at the wembley factory were being laid off, and finally they closed it all together, then the Leeds factory went the same way i believe.
At the time one big contract was Bps new image; rolled dibond panels with neon stripe, BP supplied all the tools, lorries and vans, to the fitting crews (who were subbies) they could totally fit out a complete large petrol station in about 4 days, and they were getting thousands for it, that’s not a bad weeks work. Stanchion boxes, ( the illuminated box above the pumps as it was back then with what the pumps had, like leaded diesel etc) They would get paid about £145 to install, these took 15-20 minutes to do, so you can see there is big money involved
I have to agree with Marcella, that the only people that lose out are the workers, the owners, be it share holders or other wise, make sure their pockets a full.
I’ve been made redundant four times, and the directors all came away sorted, they got to keep their company car, got their full wages etc, (funny thing was at one place you hardly ever saw a director, suddenly they were working most of the night for three week before we went bust???) where as us, the workers got nothing just two weeks holiday pay and what ever you could carry without being caught.Small companies like most of us on here (one man in a spare room)…don’t impact the blue chip sign industry at all, that’s ridiculous to suggest and i doubt very much if it took £5m to refurb a factory, they had all the equipment, from their last place… What springs to mind, is Rome burning and violins
Simon
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I’m interested by the label of ‘spare room sign company’, I’d never thought of it like that. Most of the ppl I’ve visited who work from home have very professional setups, so it sounds a bit derogatory some how 😕
It is a shame that a company thats been going for 207years is going out of business, but surely a company of that size and resources shouldn’t fall by the wayside when there is so much work about. I disagree that the small concerns don’t take work from the blue chip sign companies, as I know of at least two signmakers who are currently making signs for blue chip companies, work that would ordinarily go to the larger sign companies.
Makes you wonder where the sign industry is going though. Does the demise of Pearce mean that William Smiths is now the longest established sign company still trading? Probably makes them the largest as well doesn’t it?
Cheers, Dewi
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Dewi, what i was saying is most of us on here couldn’t fiance a large job for a blue chip company not that we don’t have the skill to do it…. BP wouldn’t come to any of us to re-brand all of the petrol stations, and if they did who could afford to do it, even if i remortgaged or sold my house that wouldn’t buy the equipment or materials to do the job.?
I, like probably a lot of others on here have done work for blue chip companies, my most recent being MBNA bank which is part of a very large network of companies, but it weren’t worth 100 of thousands
The problem is, these days when a company re-brands, they want all their shops or whatever done in a couple of weeks, that takes a massive amount of resources, too much for any one sign company.
The work is put out to several sign companies, they take on more staff bigger premises more equipment, then the re-branding slows to just doing new sites. So one week they were doing 30 sites the next week say two they then end up over resoursed.I think that’s what happened to Oldham Signs, they did all the sites from Scotland to penzances, then their clients realised they had all their eggs in one basket, and decided to use smaller companies and spread the risk, that was Oldham signs down fall, far too big, so the work oldhams used to do was then spread to 5 other companies, so they had to down size and quick..
If you have one super sized sign company doing all your work, they can call the shots on price delivery etc, but if you have 5 other companies doing the same work and on goes down , no real loss (to them that is) because they’ve got 4 more to take up the extra work, no one can hold them to ransom..Simon
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quote Simon C:The problem is, these days when a company re-brands, they want all their shops or whatever done in a couple of weeks, that takes a massive amount of resources, too much for any one sign company.
The work is put out to several sign companies, they take on more staff bigger premises more equipment, then the re-branding slows to just doing new sites. So one week they were doing 30 sites the next week say two they then end up over resoursed.
I hadn’t thought about it like that, its feast and famine but on a massive scale. You’re right though Simon, smaller concerns wouldn’t be able to finance the rebranding of the larger companies, I was thinking along the lines of the smaller inhouse sign work and new sites.
It does make alot of sense to spread the work over several companies, although that doesn’t help the guys from these bigger companies who will now either have to find a new job or start out on their own.
Interesting thread though as its looking at the sign industry from the opposite side to the one I see every day. Alot of my customers haven’t rebranded themselves… well… ever! 😮 I was asked today if I could replace some signs for a local company, probably been up on the wall for 50 years, but they want the same design, same colours etc.
Cheers, Dewi
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Interesting comments guys. I do work here for Warner Bros.
5 years ago they used 2 companies. I bigger shop that could do fabrication etc, and a smaller shop that could react quicker to smaller jobs (me).
5 years on, and Coke look after their own signs, Peters Nestle look after their own signs, they have an inhouse art dept, the food and beverage dept have their prefered sign shop, the maintenance dept have their prefered sign shop, and marketing dept has me.
On any given day, you may have 5 sign shops doing work onsite at the same time.
I took it up with the management some time back, and they responded by saying that they can get quicker turn around of signage if the sign shop knows they will have competition to get the job. Apparently this is the trend in big industry now.
Shane
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once again i find myself appologising for an oppinion i have made.
i was not attempting to ‘slag off’ or be derogative towards home based sign companies, we all at some time surely must have been home based.
if you read my previous post again you will see that it was a question that i asked, is this the way we, the industry, no matter how big or small your set up may be,is heading? in MY experience over 16 years the shift seems to be gearing back towards low overhead, working from home sign companies.
the reason i say back towards is approx 7 years ago lots of people were working from home with a vinyl cutter, then sign shops popped up everywhere, then mostly industrial estate based units.
im not be littling this just as a personal observation it seems to be back to that again, and in a lot of cases as an addition to a non related business.
again im not slagging that idea off either, there is obviously enough work for all or we wouldnt be here would we?you would also be blinkered if you think that the impact of home based, very low overheads/costs etc companies doesnt affect the market as a whole, big or small.
i can honestly say everytime we quote signs/vans/wraps/tints etc, we are competing very hard with people who for a fact can do the job cheaper due to their set up, nothing else.if i offended anyone by these views then i appologise, but i express my thoughts based upon my experiences on a daily basis.
kevin
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It all depends on what size company you are… most working from home, i would say are doing small local business, one or two shops in the chain, then you have the medium sized companies, their more often doing small chain stores, say 10 -20 shops, then finally you have the big ones, doing the large blue chip companies tesco sainsbury virgin stuff like that..
You have the ones working from shops, doing small signs, pre-spaced letters, mouse mats, tee shirts etc, smaller work that’s quick to do nothing to complicated, 10-20 minute turnaround type of thing (as most shops have limited space) and that’s what their customers want, being mainly Jo public
Then the ones working from factory units, doing bigger stuff inlaid perspex panels, built up letters, neon etc stuff that takes longer to do but cost 20 times the amount… Not saying that any one of the two are better or less demanding, they are just set up different, to cater for there market, there’s no point having a small shop and trying to make complicated time consuming signs, when you have Jo public coming through the door every five minutes wanting “no parking” signs and the same with a large unit and all you want to do is make small signs and printed mouse mats, when the public never come in…I worked for a company as drawing office/production manager.. there were five of us one Secretary two directors, one being the sales director and two production workers, we didn’t take on the simple one off jobs (foamex panels screwed to the wall type things) all our work was for the slightly bigger companies, Kodak being our main one, we did a lot of built up letters, neon, inlaid panels, and prototype work (we designed and installed the first Pret-a-manger sandwich shop) we didn’t compete with the one person sign companies, as there type of work didn’t give us enough profit, its much better doing 2 or 3 designs and putting it on to 5 shops than 5 designs for the one..
We all over lap to some degree or other, but if you find yourself competing with a one person sign maker, then you need to rethink your business for the type of work your getting?? Its all a fine balance between demand resources and money..
Simon
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quote :Mate, being aussie based I have no idea who these guys are. We have had our share of companies that have gone under here too, after appearing hugely busy and successful.
This company just happened to be not only the biggest Sign Company in the UK, but also the oldest, 200 years.
People always ask me how far do I want to expand my company, not in turnover but how many i employ. Answer is, i don’t! Many say this outlook is not the forward way of thinking in business, but these days, there is so much at stake. I would sooner have sustainable work than to start running short at critical times of the year (after xmas being the most notable).
I have always thought, with the number of smaller companies taking on larger contracts, would the “big boys” survive, and have always come to the conclusion, their days are numbered. The large roll out contracts appear to be reducing, and so does the level of service the largest companies offer.
My personal opinion regarding the large companies are, they are fighting too few contracts, and are reducing prices to an almost unsustainable level, just to get the work. Corners are then being cut, and so is quality. What effect that has on all the smaller companies they then sub work to? They want everything cheaper etc which then has a domino effect within the trade.
So i don’t think the collapse of Pearce is just accounting. As quoted to me only the other day, if a car costs £9k and you know its costs x to make, you don’t then say to a dealer i will give you £7k, they don’t devalue the car, yet as an industry, we are only too quick to do so (thanks Guy for the quote, i agree 100% with you).
My other major concern with this happening to Pearce, what affect will this be to many of the smaller companies who have supplied them? I only hope others will not be ‘taken’ with them! 🙁
Vince
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