Brompton Bicycle is an incredible success story of British design, engineering, innovation and, unusually, a story of large-scale manufacturing within the M25. Brompton is the largest UK cycle manufacturer, producing nearly 50,000 bikes a year from their new Greenford Factory, exporting 80% of production to 47 countries worldwide.
Will Butler-Adams is the dynamic young CEO who has overseen impressive company growth of Brompton Bicycle, from a company with a £2 million turnover in 2008 to £32.7million in 2017 with over 250 employees. Awarded an OBE in 2014 for services to UK manufacturing, Will has also been listed as one of the Evening Standard’s ‘The Progress 1000 – London’s most influential people’.
In the very first year of industry placements from the Dyson School of Design Engineering, one of our students joined the Brompton R&D team. There is clearly a strong synergy between our respective visions and in the potential we share to support and evolve UK based design and engineering innovation.
At the Royal Society of Arts Will commented:
“What you need to have in a business is permanent disorder. Permanent change, permanent new ideas, permanent questioning. As people, we like to have order. But that doesn’t create change. That doesn’t stretch the business. So this business is always changing. If we are going to be a hundred-million-pound business or a billion-pound business, then we’ve got to keep on coming up with new ideas and coming up with new ways to approach problems and solve problems.”
These such principles apply in multiple business sectors and areas of commercial opportunity. The next business initiative for Brompton Bicycle is the expansion in to the electric bike market with the new Brompton Electric – a product launched successfully into the UK market in 2018 and now set for a European launch at the start of 2019. This new initiative sits perfectly alongside Will’s personal vision to get 40% of Londoners cycling before he reaches 80 years of age.
Register for what will be a highly popular talk in the new main lecture space within the Dyson Building. Our monthly lecture series is followed by Q&A and informal drinks and networking.