MY FIRM
SCH SUPPLIES
|Firm Name : SCH Supplies | Established :1986|
|MD : Andrew Rodwell | Employees : 22 |
Can you give us a bit of background on the
firm?
SCH manufacture a huge variety of machinery
for use by landscapers, groundsmen, private
gardeners as well as smallholders and equestrians.
We have over a thousand dealers throughout
the UK, and we have worked with them and our
customers for over thirty years.
The company was founded in 1986 by myself,
I had a large garden and a ride-on mower but
could never find the sort of attachments that I
wanted to put on the back. It frustrated me to see
my expensive ride-on sitting idle for much of the
time, so I set about designing a lawn care system
with interchangeable tools. I soon had friends and
neighbours asking to make these items for them
too, and so from necessity came invention and
many other products followed. After taking the
attachments to a show, SCH was born.
What is the most exciting piece of work you
have done as a firm recently?
We have, through our dealers, supplied machinery
for several Royal households – but we couldn’t
possibly say which ones! We are also particularly
excited about our continuing development of
artificial surface maintenance machinery, which is
gaining a great reputation among schools, sports
grounds and other amenities that use sand filled or
3G surfaces in their spaces.
Have you seen much change in the industry
over the years?
We have, and most of the changes have been good.
People seem to be better informed about how to
keep their facilities in the best condition and as a
designer and manufacturer this drives us to keep
innovating and producing units that deliver on
their promises.
In your opinion what is your most unique
product?
I would say it’s the fact that you can have pretty
much anything as a unique product! One of the
things I am most proud of is that SCH offers
a ‘bespoke build’ service which lots of people
take advantage of. Despite the fact that we have
approximately 150 variations of products in our
brochure, we realised a long time ago that people
always have very specific requirements. So when
we get calls asking, ‘can we have that sprayer with
a wider boom?’, or ‘I like that trailer but I’d prefer
it to be a foot longer, can you do that? we almost
always say yes.
What’s in store for the firm in the coming
years?
We believe that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
So we will continue along the same path but as
always, we’ll listen to feedback, keep a keen eye
on the industry and adapt our machines and
practices to fit. We’d also like to build up our
export agents. We currently export to Germany,
France, Sweden and Holland and would like to
increase our representation abroad. We will also
keep designing new machinery, particularly in the
artificial surface sector as that seems to generate
lots of interest.
ABOUT THE FIRM
SCH Supplies design and manufacture a range of machinery for landscapers and groundsmen, including trailers, sprayers,
grooming rakes and brushes and watering units. Website: www.schsupplies.co.uk
April 2018 | Landscape Insight
49