A little more than two years after memorial wholesaler Frank England was bought out by its management it is ready to reassert itself as one of the UK’s major memorial wholesalers and granite processors.
Out – the British Racing Green so long associated with memorial wholesaler Frank England. In – a ribbon in shades of bright orange footing clear white backgrounds contrasted by black text in contemporary fonts.
It is bright, sharp, clean and modern. It is the new look of Frank England in its just-published brochure and on its new website.
It is a look that will greet visitors to the company’s stand at the NAMM memorial trade exhibition at Warwickshire Exhibition Centre on 19 & 20 June, where the new brochure will be available. And if Frank England’s retail memorial masonry customers like it, they can have it printed with their own company name and address on it to personalise it for them when they give it to the bereaved.
Nick Livermore, the Managing Director of Frank England who headed the buy-out of the company from Pisani in 2013, says the NAMM exhibition will be an important platform for Frank England to show its new look, its new range, its new brochure and its new website. “We need to show we are a new, independent company that can help retailers to show something different. It’s a case of showing our capabilities.”
The new look has been created by Dan Goff, who is now head of memorial design at Frank England as the company re-establishes itself in its new format.
As Natural Stone Specialist reported last year (see NSS July/August issue), Pisani was hit hard by the economic downturn and focused on its core business activity of stone wholesaling. Part of the fall-out of that was the retirement of the Director who had run Frank England. Nick Livermore, who had been at Frank England for 24 years at that time, was invited to buy the company. In February 2013 the buy-out was successfully concluded.
Frank England had operated a joint venture business in India. That was dissolved before the buy-out, although Nick retains a close relationship with the company’s former partners in India. Doing so, he maintains, helps him to obtain some of the best natural and unenhanced black granite available in the UK today.
When Nick took over Frank England the company used the services of a freelance design team. Nick wanted to bring that function in-house because he considered it a vital ingredient in the Frank England mix, allowing the company to offer a bespoke service when so many people are now selling finished memorials directly from the Far East.
At the same time, Dan Goff, who was then working for one of Frank England’s memorial customers in Essex, was looking for opportunities nearer to his wife’s home turf of Doncaster. After Nick had seen some of Dan’s ideas for memorials he invited Dan to join the Frank England team, which is a tight-knit unit employing 12 people.
Since then Dan has been working on producing the designs for the new brochure and website. He previewed them on Twitter to get feed-back before including them in the new brochure and on the website. The original stones are now also displayed in a small showroom at the Frank England factory in Retford, Nottinghamshire.
It is a source of extreme annoyance to Frank England, as well as to other British wholesalers, that their designs are stolen by Far Eastern manufacturers and sold directly to the bereaved in this country through the internet. Frank England’s own photographs are sometimes even taken from their website and brochure and used by these companies. It is illegal, but difficult to combat.
As well as the new designs, Dan produces one-off commissions. The latest is a cylindrical black granite memorial for the British Embassy in Moscow. It involved hand sand-blasting letters in both English and Russian in a spiral around the cylinder.
Unsurprisingly, a Russian Cyrillic script had to be bought specially for the job, with the words being checked with extreme care before being blasted on to the stone.
This year Frank England has also been joined by Shaun Hopkinson, previously managing Spanish stone wholesaler Levantina’s UK operation with its two warehouses (in the North and South of England). Before joining Levantina, Shaun had also worked for Pisani.
Shaun has been recruited by Frank England to head the sales operation and expand the company’s existing business in worktops and architectural stone signs and notices – because Frank England has for some time been using its granite processing capability to expand its customer base beyond the memorial masonry sector.
Being one of a small band of processors that can actually make memorials, rather than just importing them, it has had a steady business in bespoke work, both memorial and commercial.
Notably it made a 6m high memorial in five parts for the Falklands and one commemorating the ‘little ships’ that evacuated the troops from Dunkirk at the start of World War II. It has also made several contributions to the memorials at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas.
The plan is that within the next few years Shaun will run the sales team rather than being the sales team as Frank England re-establishes its market position and the market itself grows, as it now shows signs of doing.
Shaun says he was particularly impressed with the quality of both the Frank England manufacturing and the granite it was using (95% of it from India). “I have been in the worktop trade and seen a lot of good granite, but Frank England’s Black Velvet is the best – we just don’t accept second best. We’re trying very hard to supply top quality material at a very competitive price – there’s a big hole in the market for such good quality.”
With the economy returning to what looks like sustainable growth last year, there is a high level of optimism at Frank England now, just as there is throughout much of the business community. Nick Livermore says that although demand for memorials is still a little subdued compared with the pre-2008 days, it is starting to pick up again and he is optimistic for the years ahead.
The memorial sector faces challenges, of course – not least with councils selling memorials directly to the public (read more about that from page 20). But Nick believes that by continuing to add value with its own factory in the UK, Frank England has a proposition for the bereaved via its network of memorial wholesalers and funeral directors that will continue to bring success in the memorial sector, augmented by growth in the architectural market.