18 | Aycliffe Today Business
WINNING
Dr John Suggate, chairman of Formula Plastics who set the company up more than 20 years ago.
FORMULA
Aycliffe Today editor Martin Walker meets Dr John Suggate, the chairman and founder of injection moulding specialists and major success story Formula Plastics...
It’ s safe to say most of us take for granted what goes into making the everyday machines and devices we rely on to live and work. On Aycliffe Business Park, we’ re surrounded by manufacturing companies famous for making washing machines, lawnmowers and shower cubicles.
But there are even more smaller companies that are helping to fuel the manufacturing sector by making millions upon millions of parts that go into many of our finished products.
And Formula Plastics has its own impressive tale to tell about how it has evolved over the years.
The injection moulding specialists have now been on the business park for more than 20 years.
The firm was set up in 1996 by polymer chemist Dr John Suggate, initially to supply plastic parts to Thorn Lighting in Spennymoor.
He started out with five staff – three directors, an operator and a packer – having rented a 5,000 sq ft unit at the IES Centre, the former Underground Mining Machine( UMM) site just behind Crafter’ s Companion off Horndale Avenue, which closed in the 1980s after the demise of the coal mines.
Now spread across five units at the IES Centre, totalling 44,000 sq ft, Formula Plastics has seen sales double to £ 3.9m in the last five years, with staff numbers growing to 62.
The firm produces hundreds of thousands of plastic parts for manufacturers in the automotive, lighting and electronics sectors across the North-East and beyond.
It has certainly come a long way since former chemistry researcher Dr Suggate, originally from Chingford in Essex who studied a PhD in polymer chemistry, formed the company to solve a job-hunting dilemma.
“ I’ d relocated to the North-East after landing a job with a packaging company in Cramlington and brought my family up,” says Dr Suggate.“ But then that didn’ t work out. I spent a while job-hunting but I couldn’ t find