A Bromsgrove-based flooring company is set to extend the red carpet treatment with a new warehouse aimed at both the trade and the public.
The £500,000 investment will see Poplar Carpets create a significant number of new jobs – up to 12 in addition to the existing 103-strong workforce with another 50 employees in the pipeline when further earmarked expansion comes together.
The property, Unit A on the Harris Business Park, were secured with the help of Redditch property agents John Truslove.
“We never subscribed to the recession when everyone else did,” said managing director Steve Day. “Business just kept climbing all the way through. I am led to believe we are one of the fastest growing SMEs locally.”
Ian Parker, a director of John Truslove, said: “Poplar Carpets are an amazing success story and are going from strength to strength. We were very pleased to be able to assist.”
Family-owned Poplar Carpets has been operating for 50 years with Mr Day in charge for the last 20.
Its main store and headquarters is at Rubery and it holds stocks of more than 250,000 metres of flooring at any one time.
There is a warehouse on the Saxon Business Park, Bromsgrove, depots in Crawley and Peterborough, and a contract arm, Contract Flooring Solutions, which has all the major house builders as clients including Barratt Homes, Bellway, David Wilson Homes, Bovis Homes, Taylor Wimpey and Kier Homes.
“We do 40-50 houses a day utilising a fleet of 40 vans,” said Mr Day. “Our business naturally generates a huge amount of surplus material and we needed to get a method of getting it to market. We need to display that and this is what the new facility will do.”
There will be around 400 remnant end of rolls on display at the Harris Business Park outlet which extends to 6,942 sq ft and which has been purchased by Poplar Carpets for a six-figure sum. It will comprise both commercial and domestic stock.
The extra jobs partly reflect how Poplar Carpets directly employs its staff including fitters.
Mr Day, who recently completed a six months part-time course at Aston University as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme, says it continues to recruit.
“We were learning about cash flows and balance sheets and the like – it was very useful,” he noted.
And indeed he aims to put it to good use immediately with plans to grow the van fleet to 60 and the intention of establishing a third depot, near Bristol, in the early part of next year.
“We want to boost turnover from the current £10 million to £15 million by the end of our 2015/16 financial year,” said Mr Day. “That will probably create around another 50 jobs.”
