LONDON: Walker Greenbank PLC, the luxury interior furnishings group, is restarting manufacturing on a phased, demand-led basis following the Covid-19 related shutdown of its two UK factories.

Staff began to return last week to Standfast & Barracks, the Company’s fabric printing factory in Lancaster, and this week staff will return to the Company’s wallpaper printing factory, Anstey & Co, in Loughborough.

As previously announced, both factories were temporarily closed due to Covid-19 and factory staff furloughed. Staff are returning to the factories on a phased basis following both factories having been made Covid-19 secure in line with UK Government guidelines.

The phased re-opening of both factories is to meet customer demand, together with preparations ahead of the autumn selling season. The Company has continued to serve customers worldwide throughout the lockdown period from its warehouses in the UK and US.

Last month, Standfast & Barracks won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2020 for International Trade, reflecting the factory’s strong growth in export sales in the past three years. The factory has continued to attract overseas orders during the past few weeks and it has also donated more than 3,000m of fabric to a local community group in Lancashire sewing scrubs for care workers.

Standfast & Barracks will this week begin printing its third party order book, requiring about half of the factory’s workforce to be back at work.

The first staff at Anstey & Co will return this week to prepare the wallpaper factory’s printing machinery for print runs including Zoffany’s new Palladio collection, an exciting screen-printed wallpaper collection that draws on the original Palladio wallpapers launched in the 1950s which subsequently became part of the Company’s Sanderson archive. In addition to archive-based designs, the collection will feature a completely new design by the influential designer Sam Wilde to add a contemporary dimension to the collection and to continue the tradition established in the 1950s of talented new designers creating Palladio wallpapers.

The launch of Zoffany’s Palladio collection will take place in September this year using innovative digital resources compared with a traditional product launch.

Lisa Montague, Walker Greenbank’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “Throughout the Covid-19 lockdown, we have continued to fulfil customer orders from our warehouses in Milton Keynes and New Jersey and we are very grateful to staff who have enabled us to keep trading. We are now pleased to be able to restart manufacturing at our UK fabric and wallpaper printing factories in line with current health and safety guidelines.

“Standfast & Barracks’ recent Queen’s award for international trade reflects the excellence of the fabric factory’s design, manufacturing and service and its ability to win third-party export orders.

“From our own brands, we are particularly excited by the forthcoming launch of Zoffany’s Palladio wallpaper collection, an archive-derived reinvention of critically acclaimed wallpapers from the 1950s along with a completely new design, Precarious Pangolins, by Sam Wilde.”