One of the first tea towel designs we produced for The British Museum

The blog is slightly late this week as we have been so busy following Spring Fair and also because of the large volume of new enquires and orders coming in at the moment.  I have also been out of the office on Tuesday for a visit to The British Museum – a very valued customer who we first started dealing with at the time of the Terracotta Army exhibition. 

Following Spring Fair we have been receiving a lot of interest in our tea towels, bags, aprons, kitchen textiles, mugs, paper giftware, garments and melamine coasters and mats.  It was also good to meet up with so many existing customers for a chat too.

Our stand at Spring Fair 2012 where we exhibited our wide range of tea towels, bags, kitchen textiles etc.

Back at the factory; recently the BBC Look North’s Business and Economics reporter, Paul Murphy, came over to film for a feature on businesses who are ‘Bucking the Trend’ during the recession.

The BBC's Look North reporter Paul Murphy filming cotton bags being printed

The feature should now be going out around the start of March so as soon as we know the actual date we will publish it on the blog.  We are also hoping to feature some of the footage on the website too in due course.

Best wishes

Kathy Brookes

Sales Director

New generic Countryside Art header card

We have recently introduced some new cardboard header-card packaging for tea towels enabling the tea towels to be hung up on a euro slot without a plastic bag.

These headers are available with either our own generic Countryside Art design (with no minimum order) or can feature the customer’s own design specific to themselves (minimum order quantities apply). 

Tea towel header designed for Portmeirion

We have featured some photos showing some of the headers we have already supplied featuring customer’s own designs. 

A swing ticket can also be added showing the full tea towel design too if required.  The photo of the RNLI tea towel shows an added swing ticket.

Tea towel header and swing ticket designed for the RNLI

The advantages of this type of packaging are that the header cards are completely recyclable.  The quality of the fabric can be felt by the prospective buyer and the tea towels can also be displayed neatly in a small retail area.  

Both the headers and the swing tickets can be designed in-house by Countryside Art or customers can provide their own artwork placed into templates that we provide. 

Portmeirion Prisoner tea towel header

Although the headers are designed for hanging on euro slots, the header-carded tea towels can also be neatly displayed flat on shelving too.

For more information please contact us at sales@countrysideart.co.uk or call on 01790 754 806.

The company was originally started in 1975 by our parents, John and Margery Chapman, plus a very close family friend Patrick Carnwath.  Prior to this they had all established a small screen printing company producing home furnishings which ran for a few years until it out-grew the buildings in which it was housed.  The original reason our parents wanted to set up a business close to home was in order to be able to spend more time helping to looking after our younger brother Patrick (nicknamed Patch) who has severe learning difficulties.

The establishment of Countryside Art coincided with a move to an Old Rectory, based in a sleepy Lincolnshire wolds village, where John, Margery and Patrick built the first small workshop in the tree filled grounds.

The move to the new premises and change of name also brought a change of direction.  John’s mother and our Grandmother, Pat Chapman, was also a very entrepreneurial lady. She persuaded John, who had a great talent for drawing and painting, to produce a couple of tea towel designs for some local churches with whom she was friends with members of the congregations.  Once these were in the public domain she took samples around other churches and as far as our main stream giftware business was concerned, it all started from those small beginnings.

With John designing and printing, Patrick assisting in sales and Margery running the quality control and despatch, business continued in the same way for a few years although a new partner Simon Hildred also came on board during this time.

Very early on in Countryside Art’s existence, children from our brother Patch’s Special Needs School started coming up one afternoon a week to experience hand-silk screen printing and designing.  One of the projects they completed was to produce their own tea towel featuring the children’s drawings and a picture of the school.

Our Grandmother immediately saw the potential in this idea and again went off and marketed the idea to all her local schools.  The rest is history – needless to say the idea was a huge hit and we quickly became the main producer of School tea towels, something which we still are to this day.

As the company was consistently growing throughout this period both Lawrence and I joined.  A second building was also built on the same site as we had outgrown the original workshop.

Around 2003 we realised we were going to have to move as the business had out-grown the premises yet again and there was no way we could extend the buildings any further.

After a prolonged search for a suitable site we decided to move to our local market town of Spilsby on to the industrial estate.  It was quite a wrench deciding to leave the original workshops as the surroundings were idyllic but we were very lucky in being able to find a site right on the edge of the estate facing over farmland with a fantastic view across the fens.

By the late summer of 2006 we had over-come all the planning problems and were ready to move in to our purpose-built factory mainly designed by John and Lawrence.  The building was a complete success allowing the production to flow smoothly throughout. 

By this time our parents were taking much more of a back seat in the running of the company with Lawrence and I taking over the day-to-day responsibility.  However after we had completed the move they decided it was finally time to take a well-earned rest and they both retired. Although, to this day, they still continue to take a great interest in their ‘baby’.

With our experience of having a brother with learning difficulties; throughout the whole existence of the company we have always tried to employ people with disabilities wherever possible.  We have had some great members of staff throughout the years whose contributions to the company have been immense despite being over-looked by other employers.

Our interest in continuing to help with issues of disability led to us winning BT’s Deaf Employer of the Year in 1994 and we also work closely with the Shaw Trust assisting us to currently offer jobs to two employees in need of support.

Our brother Patch continues to live within our family with our parents and is a frequent visitor to the factory.

We would like to thank edge-newmedia.co.uk for the great job they have done designing the new site.

Since moving in to our new factory in 2006 the business has changed direction quite considerably.  We found our customers were requiring a higher and higher level of bespoke personalisation and we have responded to that demand.

Our purpose-built factory houses our large format M.H.M printing carousels, the latest gas dryers plus the most up-to-date screen processing technology.

We are experts in working with water-based inks, offering both full colour process (in which we specialise) and spot colour printing in up to eight spot colours.  We also offer all-over print coverage on even the largest items such as the tea towels and aprons.  In addition we can print bags with all-over prints including printed handles. We are very happy to discuss any aspect of our customer’s requirements and can advise on the most suitable type of print and the most efficient way of printing their designs.

Our set up costs are low making smaller print runs from quantities of 100 items up to many thousands cost effective and our lead times can also be more favourable than sourcing from overseas.

Where we are unique as a company is we have our own in-house sewing unit where we manufacture the majority of the final products.  This enables us, as well as offering a standardised range, to be able to customise products to our customer’s own specifications.

Our services include being able to sew in our customer’s own labels, hanging loops, making products to specific shapes and sizes and also looking at bespoke items not covered in our price list.  Again, we are always on hand to discuss any queries our customers may have regarding the bespoke manufacturing of their products.

Over the last few years we have also responded to the demand for personalised packaging including swing ticketing, wrap-arounds, header cards, inserts and bar-coding.  With in-house digital and lithographic printing we are able to assist with the design and print of all these items adding yet another layer of branding to our customer’s products.

As well as our customers looking for a high level of bespoke manufacture many of our customers still want to purchase our more traditional giftware and we continue to offer the same superb level of quality and service to this area of the market too.

We hope, whatever your requirements, Countryside Art will be able to assist you in producing a superb quality UK-made product.