Four business tips for every manufacturer
Posted: November 03, 2025
I spend my days visiting Britain’s factories, observing those workers who, with a subtle nod or a smile, indicate they are happy to chat to me—a stranger with a microphone in hand—while they sew, hammer or carve. I learn about their lives and the skills they’ve frequently spent decades polishing.
I also spend hours away from the factory floor, in tea rooms and boardrooms, listening to business owners and managing directors. During these conversations, I learn what it takes to thrive (or survive) as a manufacturer in a developed economy.
Every time I wave goodbye and pass back through the factory gates, I’ve received another lesson. Here, I want to share four tips from manufacturing managers that I think every maker needs to remember.
1. When you’re squeezed, go against your gut
On the east coast of England, looking out across the North Sea, is the seaside town of Great Yarmouth. It’s got a lovely long beach with amusement arcades dotted along the edge—but I didn’t make the long drive from London to gamble, I came to hear about a manufacturer who bet on themselves.
Yarmouth Oilskins is a 125-year-old clothing company that initially made garments for local fishermen. But over recent decades, that industry has declined sharply, and so has the need for fishing smocks and oilskins.
Creative director Sophie Miller joined the company in 2017, a time when the garment-maker was being squeezed from every angle. When you’re feeling the pinch, you naturally look to cut costs—exactly what the company was doing.
“When everyone else was shipping their manufacturing overseas, we persevered with making ours here, producing low-value, low-quality, high-volume workwear,” Sophie explained to me over a cup of tea, sat in the factory’s canteen.
“But that’s not financially viable. You’re competing with things made in the Far East that are sold for pence.”
When Sophie first joined the company, the owner, realizing cutting costs wasn’t going to save them, asked her what could be done. Taking inspiration from the firm’s heritage, Sophie designed pieces that had the quality resewn into them. “It was about putting back in all of the value that had been engineered out for cost. Everything was made with French seams, using quality British fabrics and Corozo buttons. It was about making really special basic workwear.”
Sophie put the cost back into Yarmouth Oilskins’ pieces and found new customers who appreciated the higher quality.
2. Do what you love at home, do what you’re good at for work
Emma Willis’ shirts sit on the shoulders of King Charles, Stormzy and Daniel Craig—to name a few from her stellar client list. But the career path she envisaged in her 20s was not in the clothing industry: She entered adulthood training at London’s Slade School of Fine Art.
“I loved drawing people predominantly. I used to write quite a lot too. And I used to sing. I loved pretty much all the arts, and I was trying to find one that I had any talent in at all,” she tells me in her office on the top floor of Bearland House, a glorious Grade II listed building in the center of the historic city of Gloucester. Built in the 1740s, the house has, over the years, been used as a private residence, a telephone exchange, a high school for girls and commercial offices. Today, its rooms are filled with magicians turning fabric into some of the world’s finest shirts.
“I thought I had to give up on my creativity because I left art school after a year. I didn’t have the talent to justify my place there.” Emma can smile about it now, but she admits to feeling like a failure for much of her twenties and into her thirties, even when she was building a name for herself as an exceptional shirtmaker.
One day, tired from the monumental effort of trying to create a brand, she decided to close the business.
“I told my cutter, Gary, I said, ‘Gary, you can have all my customers. I can’t do this anymore.’ Then I was sitting quietly at home in the evening, on my own and with the children all in bed. And I thought, if I give up this now… I am not going to be a writer. I'm not going to be a singer. I'm not going to be a painter. I haven't got what it takes to succeed at those.”
And then, in one sentence, Emma summed up why she changed her mind (said sorry to Gary, he couldn’t have her customers) and how she found the resilience to take her business to the next level.
“The only thing that I've excelled at, that this world is likely to want me for, is my years of knowing what a beautiful, bespoke shirt is all about.”
It is not, “Do what you love.” It is, “Do what you are great at.”
3. The eye still outsmarts AI
In the Buckinghamshire countryside, at a former military research site, you can find Nammo UK, a private company making rocket engines—the type of engines that the world’s largest space agencies, as well as multi-national corporations, trust to maneuver their satellites.
When I visited, chief engineer Dr. Ian Coxhill greeted me in the reception of Nammo’s modern and bright manufacturing building before taking me on a tour of the site. I was expecting a spacious facility, impeccably clean, with lots of ultra-high-precision machinery. Which is what it is.
But among the expensive CNC machines, I spotted benches with vices and hand tools, the kind of instruments humans have been using for a century or more.
“There is a degree of craftsmanship which go into making these engines,” Ian explained after I’d expressed my surprise at the vintage tools. “Some of the operations we do actually demand the old non-automated techniques, so we can get the feel and precision to achieve them.”
Dr. Coxhill told me about their micro hole driller—a key part of their manufacturing process that they had tried to automate. Several companies came in with the smartest computers and most sophisticated robots.
“They failed. They were snapping drill bits left, right and center. They were unable to meet the accuracy or reliability we need to make our rocket injector elements.” Surprised, I repeated back to him what he’d told me, to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what had happened. I hadn’t.
“Yes, we went back to the human eye and hand. You can feel the drilling process, and that feedback into the operator’s hand is crucial for enabling that drill bit to remain running true and to be able to cut accurately.”
“So, we went back to using the Mark 1 eyeball and the manual operation.”
4. A soul gives you a longer life
On the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, sat between a car repair center and a document-shredding company, you'll find Pashley Cycles, which has been manufacturing bicycles by hand in Britain since 1926.
It was heaving with rain when I pulled up outside, but that’s okay. Pashley bikes are beautiful things, and I was about to watch them being born.
Adrian Williams is the chairman and was my guide for the day. After apologizing for bringing bad weather, there was always one question I was going to ask. “In the 80s and 90s, when all your competitors were offshoring, why not you?”
Adrian smiled. He knew what he wished to say.
“So many people have said to me in the past, look, Adrian, why have you not moved your manufacturing to a cheaper location? You could just have a handful of people doing the sales and some of the designs and just import like others do. But you lose the soul of the business.”
What did he mean by the soul of the business?
“I don't want to make a big thing of this, but it's really important that we can connect with our local community and the wider community. What's terrific with what we do is that you can have school leavers who maybe don't want to take the academic route, and we can bring them on board. And it's not just our employees. We've got about 90 UK suppliers who are supplying into us.”
It's a calm factory. On the left, skilled brazers solder together the tubing. At the far end, workers spray paint the frames. To the right, the bicycles are assembled. When I visited, there wasn’t much banging or shouting or the sound of heavy machinery. People were quietly going about their business. It was like a ride through an English village.
“Yes, if I wanted to make a shedload of money, I should have just said, ‘OK, let's start importing.’ But you become a badge, and then what's the longevity of that brand?”
“It just dissipates and shrivels up. It hasn't got any authenticity to it because the people who are holding on to that brand are just trying to make money out of it.”
Pashley is about to celebrate its centenary, so before I departed, I asked what, in another 100 years, the company’s current chairperson would say about the “Adrian Williams-era.”
He laughed as he replied, “Oh, that guy was crazy. Why on Earth did he do what he did?”
When I visit factories and chat to people, I scribble notes in my pad so that, in later questions, I can pick them up on key phrases they’ve said. I left Stratford-upon-Avon with pages of notes, but two words were dotted throughout:
“Authenticity” and “soul.”
That’s why Adrian does what he does.
Listen to the Factory Next Door on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube. Follow the Factory Next Door on Instagram. The Factory Next Door is supported by AVEVA.
