On 2nd January 1991, John Major was the Prime Minister of the UK, George Bush was the President of the USA, “Iron Maiden” held the UK no. 1 song and both Philip Brodey and Craig Brodey started work at Norbar Torque Tools.
I am writing this blog now as I retire at the end of April 2022, after 31 years at Norbar, and wanted to capture some memories from those early days.
31 years of service is not extraordinary by Norbar standards; in the last twelve months two staff with over 50 years each have retired. But, even looking back on my relatively modest 31 years it is astonishing how much has changed. I will focus on the things that impacted me the most because others are in a much better position to talk in detail about changes in the factory and laboratory, for example.
What was the company like in 1991?
The short answer is, a fairly traditional family-owned SME business. Craig and I joined our fathers, Ian and John Brodey (Managing Director and Sales Director respectively) and Neill Brodey (Craig’s brother, my cousin) who had started a few years ahead of us as Quality Manager. My position in the company was Marketing Manager and Craig’s was Commercial Manager.
Norbar was situated on the Beaumont Road Industrial Estate in Banbury. The factory was a long thin site of around 50,000 sq.ft with a two-storey, full-width office building on the front. The upper floor offices housed the Directors, the sales office, finance and secretaries. The factory had been extended during 1990 to create a very nice torque wrench assembly hall to the rear of the building and freeing up space to expand the machine shop. Although we had plenty more land to the rear, because the ground sloped up quite steeply, this 1990 extension was the last we were able to do and all subsequent improvement work occurred within the footprint of the building. By 2012 we had run out of space and purchased our current, Wildmere Road factory.
Craig and I initially shared an office next door to John and Ian which was a pleasant place to be. Admittedly, our window looked out over the factory roof but we had the benefit of a fire escape door that was lovely to throw open in the warmer months. There was no air conditioning of course!
One of the quirky things about Norbar at the time was that our boardroom table would convert to a ¾ size snooker table and in the early 90s we would sometimes still find time to use it for a while after lunch. To be fair, that table was a symbol of an era that was rapidly drawing to a close.
In 1990, our total sales revenue was £6.1 million, a little above the target that we had set ourselves and a solid growth over 1989. About 39% of this was represented by hand torque wrenches. Most of the growth had come from pneumatic tools, Pneutorque® wrenches, where we had found a good market in pipeline construction.
Beaumont Road site, mid-90s
How we communicated
In January 1991 we still had the capability of receiving and sending messages by telex, not that many people used it by then. Our name ‘Norbar’ was initially our shortened telex name back when the company was actually called North Bar Tool Company. The ‘Norbar’ name was adopted when we moved out of North Bar Place in Banbury to our second premises in Swan Close Road.
Much of our communication was still received by letter and John and Ian would spend the first part of the morning opening the post. Opening the post to see what orders had been received was an immensely satisfying part of the day for them and also had a role in capturing errors as John and Ian had an intimate knowledge of the customers and what they ordered. Of course, by 1991 we were close to outgrowing this method and the orders, soon afterwards, got directed straight to the Sales Desk.
Fax was the first choice for written communication in the majority of circumstances and consequently we had filing cabinets full of the outgoing and incoming communications, sorted by customer. Those faxes and letters deemed important enough (containing contractual terms, for example) went into the ‘blue files’ that were stored in a fireproof safe. Finding what you had previously written to a customer or supplier was a laborious process!
Mobile phones had barely broken free of the car and were mostly known as car phones. Some people had truly mobile phones (and didn’t they think they were cool?!) but they were limited by the large batteries. I don’t think anyone at Norbar had one in 1991. In fact, the first digital network known as GSM did not come into being until later in 1991 and that 2G network laid the foundations for the amazing technology that we have today. Another thing; text did not initially exist. The very first text or SMS was sent in 1992 but, no doubt, this method of communication did not reach Norbar for a few years after that.
You will have noted; no mention of email. Email existed in the early 1990s but was not in common usage, at least, not by our contacts.
Office Technology
This follows neatly on from communications because, even when we did start to receive emails, most of us didn’t have a PC. The first email I received was from our sales rep in the USA and it came via my greenscreen computer monitor that was hooked up to our DEC VAX computer. I don’t remember exactly how it worked but it was a very clunky system to receive email in those early days.
Craig Brodey had come to Norbar from Ford of Europe so was accustomed to rather better technology. Consequently, Craig’s PC was probably the only one in the admin area of Norbar in early 1991. I don’t know the spec of that machine but typical of the day would have been 4MB of RAM, 200 MB hard disk and a 14” monitor. It probably ran Windows 3.0.
Although I was also familiar with PCs from my previous job with John Crane Ltd, I had never heard of Windows and I had never used a mouse. I clearly recall asking Craig “what is Windows” and being little the wiser having heard his reply.
General typing was done on dedicated word processing machines that had a CRT monitor for basic ‘what you see is what you get’ editing and memory to floppy disk. Microsoft Word existed but was not widely used at Norbar at the time (as we had few PCs).
Most of our report printing was done on noisy dot-matrix printers which were usually housed in sound-proofed cabinets. When we ran reports, they were printed on ‘tractor paper’ with holes punched down the sides for drive through the printer. Reports were often inches thick and we had masses of them. Sometimes today we ask ourselves ‘where is this paperless society that we were promised?’ but honestly, compared with 1991 we have taken massive steps.
How we travelled
It is amazing to consider that the before 16th January 1991, the M40 motorway ran from the A40 in London and finished at Oxford. All Oxford to Birmingham traffic ran through the centre of Banbury, as well as many smaller towns and villages. Living in Bicester, as I did, it was my good fortune that within two weeks of starting work at Norbar, the M40 extension from Oxford to the M42 at Birmingham, was opened. This was life changing for us at Norbar as well as for millions of others. Suddenly, our customers and suppliers in the West Midlands were an easy hour’s journey away. Birmingham Airport could be accessed from Banbury in less than an hour and only a little more to London Heathrow.
My car was a blue Ford Sierra 2.0 GLS that was a hand-me-down from UK Sales Manager John Batten. By this time, the Ford Sierra with its jelly-mould form which had initially so alienated the Ford Cortina fans, had evolved into a more handsome car – or perhaps we were just getting used to it! Our sales reps were driving a Ford Sierra and a Vauxhall Cavalier while other cars that we ran in the early 90s included Austin Montegos, Rover 820s, a VW Passat and a Ford Granada Scorpio.
Most of our air travel at the time was done from London Heathrow or perhaps Gatwick. Birmingham Airport had developed greatly with a new terminal in 1984 but really came into its own for business travel when the Eurohub opened in July 1991. This was a second terminal for Birmingham and the first in the world to combine domestic and international travel. This design was a key part in British Airways’ hub-and-spoke strategy designed to free up the congested London Heathrow and originally, Eurohub was used exclusively by BA and partner airlines. Ultimately, BA could not compete with the new, low-cost airlines and numerous restructures finally lead to the sale of BA regional operations to Flybe and the rebranding of Eurohub to the simple but dull ‘Terminal 2’ in 2007.
How we promoted ourselves
Catalogue, 1992
In thinking about how Norbar and similar companies promoted themselves, it is important to understand that there was no viable internet; the world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990 but two years later there were just 50 websites in the world and, of course, Norbar was not amongst them!
Without the internet, our promotional opportunities were much the same as they would have been for a few decades before.
Our catalogue has always been an important communication tool and what I inherited was a nice but outdated 22-page, monochrome with spot colour general catalogue. An early priority was to adopt a full colour and more comprehensive catalogue.
Exhibitions played an important part of the marketing mix and most important of all was the International Hardware Exhibition at Cologne or, as we called it, the Cologne Fair. We had been attending Cologne for many years but as part of our German distributor’s stand. In 1990 we broke away and exhibited on our own so, the year I joined was the second time that we had attended independently, not that I had much to do with it that year. The stories from Cologne in the early days are part of Norbar folk-law and I had grown up hearing about evenings at the Alt Köln restaurant with John, Ian, Geoff Allen (Torqueleader), Stan Bramley (formerly from King Dick, later at Norbar), Robert Williamson and others. Ian’s joke telling skills were legend – or rather, the fact that he would often forget the punchline which made them even funnier.
For years, Paul Carruthers and I would be the advanced guard, driving over to Cologne to set up. We tried a few different routes over (or under) the Channel – various ferry routes, hovercraft and train. In the end, Harwich to Hook of Holland was probably our favourite route. Despite various mishaps along the way, we were always ready when the show opened on Sunday morning. One of my favourite memories is the year when the Rhine level was so high the that hotel-ship we were booked to stay on had to moor several kilometres from the city centre. As the river level dropped, we were able to cruise up the river one breakfast-time to take up our intended position. Having stayed on the hotel-ships perhaps 20 times, that was the only time that we were not stationary! Although the flooding provided us with that nice memory, many buildings in Köln Alt Stadt bear witness to the flooding that they periodically experience. Indeed, the exhibition Rhine Halls (Rheinhallen) – now redeveloped – would occasionally flood.
Directories were a big part of our advertising spend. Titles like Kompass, Kellies and Dial were the go-to places to find details of a vast range of businesses. It is hard to imagine now but in 1991, pre-internet, if you wanted to find out about torque tools, the only immediate way was to pull down your Kompass tome, find ‘torque tools’, make a list of companies and then phone them up. Imagine! In the US it was perhaps even more extreme because the Thomas Register directory would take an entire bookcase.
Of course, by the mid-90s those huge directories were moving to CD and then to the internet. A host of competitors came along that would have been put off by the prospect of printing hundreds of tons of paper directories every year. It’s a very different model today and huge paper directories are something that the world is mostly better off without – unless you happen to be a printer or directory sales person.
I distinctly remember the meeting at which the internet was presented to us. I don’t recall exactly when it was but it must have been in my first three or four years. I remember thinking, ‘we aren’t sure where this is going, but we had better get on board’ – and so we did. Our first website was launched in 1996.
Norbar’s home-page in 1996
At the time we were working on a big project called ‘Technical Selector’ which aimed to pull all of the technical information about our products together on a CD. The CD version had quite a short life-span as it was quickly apparent that this information should be web-based. However, it was not until the third-generation website that we merged the database behind Technical Selector with our website which, of course, killed the CD format in about year 2000.
Looking back on it, Technical Selector was one of the most important projects that I worked on. Not that the CD form was a huge success because that format was out of date, almost from the moment we launched it. However, to this day we use the database to drive product selection on our website and it mostly works brilliantly. We recently discovered that what we developed in the early/mid 90s has a name – a product information management system or PIM. We are now, almost thirty years after ‘Technical Selector’, starting the transition to a modern, commercially available PIM platform that will bring advantages, particularly in our ability to share product database information with distributors.
What we made and sold
A selection of our products, circa 1998
It was surprisingly similar to what we make and sell today i.e. a mix of hand torque wrenches, powered and hand operated torque multiplies and a host of torque measurement and calibration solutions. Indeed, many of the products are actually the same, particularly amongst our ‘HandTorque®’ multipliers and standard series pneumatic tools – ‘Pneutorque®’. In 1990/91 you could purchase a PT1 pneumatic torque tool, part number 16011 for £1,090. Today, you can still buy a PT1, part number 16011 but for £3,625.
Now, in 2022, we have modern ranges of pneumatic tools to supplement the legacy tools (which remain popular) and, more importantly, we have introduced both corded and battery powered versions of our power tool range.
Arguably, it was the Slimline torque wrench, launched in 1963 (the year I was born), that made Norbar the company that it is today. It was the first torque wrench from Norbar that had distributor discount built into the price which meant that, for the first time, our own tiny sales team didn’t have to sell our products door to door. By 1990 we had a new torque wrench range known as ‘Professional’ but, at that time, the Slimline outsold it. Despite the award-winning design of the Professional, it had a difficult birth and it was a few years before things finally settled down and the Professional ran away with the volume.
Ask a lot of people, though, and they would tell you that the Slimline was the best wrench we ever made. We are regularly presented with 30+ year old SL2s and told by the proud owner that they are still used daily and still in tolerance.
Unfortunately, the ‘tube inside tube’ design approach used by the Slimline was expensive and forced the outer body to be chunkier than much of the competition. Despite being called ‘Slimline’, the wrench was not especially slim. The SL1, SL2 and SL3 last appeared in our price list of 2008 leaving just the SL0 to continue the name today, and that is a single tube design, essentially the diameter of the inner tube of the SL1/2/3.
Our torque measurement range could firstly be split into mechanical (hydraulic) analogue dial testers and electronic testers.
The mechanical testers called Static Torque Meters (STM) were a mainstay of our range for decades. Someone once told me that the row of those big analogue dials on the wall of their workshop was the best advert we ever had! Many STMs are still in regular use, something we know because they keep appearing in our calibration laboratory.
Over time, the STM got more costly to make and electronic measurement methods became less costly until the STM range was no longer viable, but in 1990 we sold 465 of them.
In our 1991 price list we listed three families of electronic instruments: ETTA, ETS and TWA. The ETTA was our original electronic tester and we even still listed the very first, analogue gauge version, part number 40000 (although it was ‘price on application’ – I suspect no-one applied). ETS and TWA were clearly the new families of product. They shared the same, rather clever extruded aluminium case and differed in that ETS was multi-transducer system and TWA was hard-wired to one transducer which could not be changed by the user. Anyone familiar with early Norbar electronics will recall the amplifier unit that came supplied with each transducer. This was a little box that had to be plugged into the back of the instrument. The amplifier had many thin pins that had to fit into matching sockets at the rear of the instrument. Get it wrong and you would bend a pin. The amplifier also contained the transducer zero control so you had to fiddle around with a trim tool at the rear while watching the display on the front. Certainly not ergonomically great but those instruments were superbly engineered and extremely accurate. Many of them, even ETTAs, are still in use and they undoubtedly established Norbar’s reputation in the field of electronic torque measurement.
Our accredited calibration laboratory was and still is an important part of our service offer and, in many ways, the heart of the company. In 1991 the accreditation body was NAMAS (National Measurement Accreditation Service). In 1995, NAMAS merged with NACCB (National Accreditation Council for Certification Bodies) to become UKAS. We weren’t the first NAMAS accredited torque lab in the country but we were the first tool manufacturer to have such a lab for torque. Having our magnificent lab is a source of great pride and is central to our claim that we have control of the calibration hierarchy; the tools themselves, the testers for the tools, the calibrators for the testers that test the tools.
How the products went to market
Like the products, it has not changed that much in 31 years except for ecommerce, which was unimaginable in the dawn-of-the-internet days of 1991 (Amazon was founded in 1994). Several of the businesses and families that we dealt with in 1991 are the same as today. Not only were we a family business but many of our customers were also family businesses (and still are).
Fundamentally, in 1991, the products went to market in three ways: through large engineering supply companies like Buck & Hickman and Cromwell Tools, through specialist bolting and service companies like W. Christie and Daiber Co. and through own-brand customers like Sykes-Pickavant and Beta Utensili.
Sales Conference, 1993
Front row from left: Bruce Hampton, David Waters, Philip Brodey, David Mitchell, Ian Brodey, Benjamin Tzeng, John Batten, Daniel Gallard, Chih Huang Chen
We did not tend to sell directly – and a book could be written on the rights and wrongs of that approach. John Brodey (Sales Director at the time) had an expression that summed up our position: ‘you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. We had a small external sales team, not big enough to serve the UK end-user market let-alone the world market so we were reliant on piggy-backing on to the networks and the broad ‘basked of goods’ that our distributors had access to. That is still our position and, other than a brief dalliance with selling via Amazon, we have largely steered clear of selling new products (as opposed to repairs and calibration) direct to our end-users.
A big change came in 1996 when John Brodey came back from a trip to Australia and reported that the family that owned our Australian distributor was inclined to sell the business. Concerned to protect the many years of work that had gone into establishing the Norbar brand in Australia, we took a decision to buy a share of the business. This was a first step in a strategy that ultimately saw us part-owning or owning outright our distribution and service companies in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, USA, China and India.
In Conclusion
While Bill Brodey, joint founder of the company and Grandfather to Neill, Craig, Philip and Catherine, would recognise several of our current products and several distributors, he would be staggered by the size, sophistication and complexity of the business that we have become. Although I have worked here for significantly less than half of our existence (31 years in 79), I am sure that most of the change has happened in this timeframe and the rate of change seems to continue to accelerate. Who can image what it will be like in another 30 years?
What I will miss most is the Norbar family of people, not just the people here but the extended family in our distributors, suppliers and the tool industry. It has also been a great joy to work with my family and, until I leave, there are still four of us in the business despite the fact that we are no longer family owned.
Working at Norbar has been my good fortune and a great honour. I have had opportunities to travel the world and peak inside other businesses in a way that most people could only dream of. I have visited automotive companies as diverse as the major manufacturers to F1 racing companies. I have crawled into the areas of airliners that the passengers never get to see! I have been to power plants from coal to nuclear to wind. I have been to shipyards in South Korea and a diesel/electric submarine in Australia. The purpose of this has always been to inform our product direction and almost everything that I learned has been gained from these end-user visits.
As I move on to the next chapter in my life, I wish Norbar and all associated with Norbar the best of success and, finally, thank you Norbar for a great 31 years, the memories from which I will treasure.
Philip Brodey
April 2022.