Why furloughed engineers are at the forefront of innovation

They say that the best time to innovate is during a crisis and Martin Ackroyd has spent the last few months seeing that played out.

The co-founder of high precision components supplier Accu said sales of its products to innovators have rocketed this year as furloughed engineers invest in the early stages of prototyping new products.

Innovation is a key area for the Huddersfield-based ecommerce firm, which supplies high precision engineering components to the likes of F1, Mars Rovers and, most recently, ventilator manufacturers.

The company is currently working with Elon Musk’s Neuralink business to help produce the machines which implant the chips into the brain. The brain-computer interface technology aims to enhance cognitive abilities and help those with medical conditions.

“We supply a fascinating and varied range of companies and individuals,” said Mr Ackroyd.

The company, which employs 45 staff and is expected to make £6m-£7m turnover this year, usually makes 60 per cent of its revenue from business to business transactions and the remaining 40 per cent from business to consumer.

However, this dramatically changed during the first national lockdown in March.

“The business to consumer side of our business absolutely rocketed over lockdown,” Mr Ackroyd said. “People are tinkering in their garages and sheds but the other side of it is people who are furloughed and engineers who have some downtime. They’re investing in themselves and are at the very early stages of prototyping a new product.”

Many of those initial projects, Mr Ackroyd found, were in the medical industry, including ventilator prototypes and personal protective equipment to cover the national shortage in March and April. “It was blowing my mind the types of innovation that was coming out of some of our customers,” he said.

The firm has half a million individual products in its standard offering and the number of orders dispatched from its warehouse rose by 60 per cent. The most popular products in the innovator market are precision fasteners.

Accu initially furloughed some staff after losing almost all of its business to business work, with the exception of two ventilator contracts. However, it had to quickly reverse its decision when the business to consumer side stepped up and even ended up offering overtime to its warehouse staff. The warehouse is about to start implementing two full shift patterns, stepping up from eight-hour days to 16-hour days, allowing customers to order up until 8pm for next day delivery.

“This second lockdown it’s the same thing happening again. It feels like every day we’re breaking records at the moment,” Mr Ackroyd said.

A couple of weeks ago the business received a record number of orders in one day, just under 500, and the day before our interview it broke a record for the amount of revenue created in a single day, £50,000.

Mr Ackroyd said: “The innovator market is now a key focus for the business. If we look after these innovators, then hopefully when that product goes to market, they will continue to use us for the production quantities as well. It’s a long game that we’re playing to look after them and nurture them into bigger customers.”

It’s too soon to say what trends are happening within the innovator market during the second lockdown but he believes it’s likely to be more varied this time around.

Mr Ackroyd co-founded the business with his business partner, Antony Kitson, in 2012 with £200 in the bank. He has never used any outside money to grow the business. “We’ve slowly bootstrapped our way through the past eight years,” he said.

His aim was to bring the high precision components industry into the future. ““What sets us apart from our competitors is we’re a technology business. All of the tools we use - our ecommerce system and our internal systems - are built in house. We employ more developers than sales people, which is such a different way of approaching a business like ours.”

Accu sells the majority of its components on behalf of its manufacturing partners who are based all over the world. “We can go to different manufacturing partners in different destinations, depending on what the customer requires,” Mr Ackroyd said.

“Even though we’re not manufacturing, everything is really tightly vetted to make sure that it meets our strict standards.”

The company has its sights set on global expansion. It exports to more than 150 countries worldwide, with the UK and the US its biggest markets.

It recently set up a customer services team in the US to give the firm’s customers 24/7 support.

Mr Ackroyd’s long term intention is to set up distribution centres across the world. “For me, it’s about getting our components closer to our customers,” he said. “Logically it makes sense that the first one will be in the US - we’ll certainly start planning that in 2021.”

The main challenges for the business, according to Ackroyd, are the uncertainties around the coronavirus and Brexit.

“The hardest things for us are those that are outside our control,” he said. “But I’m hoping we can return to some sort of normality next year.”

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James Mitchinson