An old and new version of our price list.
Polybags Ltd was established in 1961 and has been trading online since 1999. We have always strived to offer exceptional service and value to our customers and we extend this further online with policies like our no quibbles guarantee. Below we've given a brief outline of our history and ethos so that you can see for yourself why we continue to stand out from the crowd.
"The Customer is King", a foremost principal of Polybags and enshrined in a 1970’s poster that still displays in our Managing Director’s office today.
Polybags are a service and value based company. We aim to supply great quality products at competitive prices in exactly the way that you need them.
We specialise in polythene and polypropylene products and are here to do what you ask, and with a smile. We love to remember that old adage that ‘The Customer Is King’.
Our Royal Warrant for supplies to the Queen which we are proud to hold, plus our current BSI Quality Approval, first achieved over a decade ago as part of our investment in people.
Quality of both product and service has been key to building our long term relationships with customers and as well as holding the Royal Warrant we have been ISO Quality Approved since 1998. Above all else, we ensure close management involvement and regular training at all times.
We love big orders (of course) but equally no order is too small. We really appreciate all your business and never forget that our long term success depends on simply one thing, you.
Traditional Silver Cross Prams had plenty of room underneath for Geoffrey to load with boxes of bags that his wife Pamela delivered whilst out walking the baby!
Polybags was established in 1961 by Geoffrey Davies who purchased a bag making machine advertised in the local paper, put it in his garage and sold door to door. His wife Pamela even found herself making deliveries whilst out walking the baby in the pram!
Geoffrey found that the key was to listen to his customers’ needs and to be responsive and ready to sell at all times. It became a badge of honour that every family holiday would end with an order for bags from the hotel they stayed at.
Geoffrey and Brian used to meet every day at 5.30pm to discuss the days’ sales and production issues, often surrounded by mountains of rolls of polythene film.
As sales grew, Geoffrey teamed up with college friend Brian Turner who took charge of and developed the production process including commencing in-house blown film extrusion and 24-hour production.
Under their leadership, Polybags flourished and moved on to larger factory premises in Alperton, West London. With further growth in the 1980’s Polybags expanded into a 25,000 sq ft factory in nearby Greenford, using the extra space to continue to develop their extrusion capabilities as well as start to keep a range of stock items.
Mike Hynes setting up one of the new blown film lines after Polybags increased production through investment in new extrusion and conversion in the 1980’s.
During the 1990’s Polybags merged with local companies Kings Polythene and Cockshott Films and then Brian retired, promptly looking ten years younger. Geoffrey still plays an active and critical role however and like many entrepreneurs does not believe in such a thing as retirement.
Managing Director Jon Lomax joined Polybags in the 1990’s and has led the continuous product and process improvements that have resulted in our recent growth.
Polybags today operates from the same Greenford site but from an enlarged 35,000 Sqft factory with 13 blown film and 12 conversion lines dispatching over 80 tonnes of product per week, with a further expanded warehouse to facilitate the increased quantity and range of stocked products now supplied.
The management team is headed by Jon Lomax who is looking to build upon Geoffrey’s customer-led guiding principles and our established expertise in polythene. As well as the core industrial and retail business, we have moved into supplying garment covers, vacuum pack and mailing bags as well as supplying major packaging merchants with their polythene products.
The Stock List has morphed from a simple black and white leaflet into a substantial colour catalogue. It’s getting progressively harder to find a willing volunteer to proof read!
It has been our desire to react to your requests that has helped to create and develop both our substantial in-house manufacturing and our leading stockist division for maximum product range, flexibility and competitiveness. Our stock catalogue has got progressively thicker but we remain focused on polythene based products to maintain our product expertise and service levels.
"All extrusion lines are now silo-fed by hygienic and efficient raw material systems which reduce costs and enable an increased range of material blend options for customers."
Recent investments for the long term development of Polybags include automatic silo-fed raw material systems, 100% in-house recycling facilities and machinery to extrude new materials including starch, degradable and metallocene high strength films.
Turnover has grown steadily from £6.1m in 2006 to £7.9mil in 2009 but we have also been working hard to keep costs and prices down in what is a very challenging manufacturing environment.
As well as our leading website we have bespoke pricing and scheduling systems to ensure customer service is both fast and accurate. Further customer-led improvements are underway!
Lastly, as you will hopefully see, we have been leading the way in online customer communication, introducing a trading website way back in 1999 that has become the leading UK site for sourcing polythene bags and film, backed up by the efficient systems and products that we have in place to action the supply of product to you.
