Hear what Ian Titterington, Operations Manager at Havwoods has to say about his experience of working with Castle Industrial Supplies Ltd.

“My name is Ian Titterington, I’m Operations Manager for Havwoods International at Carnforth. Key responsibilities are the distribution of hardwood floors out of Carnforth to a global audience. We have UK distribution which is ran through Carnforth and through another depot at Northampton. We have another warehouse in Australia and USA. We also exported to 58 different countries last year and packaging is prime to everything that we do.

I came into the business 4 and a half years ago, did a full packaging review. We went to various different suppliers and we found Castle to be one of the most reliable. The fact that they are approachable 24/7. They think outside the box. We had a few challenges with some extra long products and load stability.

Sean’s come up with a lot of good ideas, which we’ve mainly implemented, and it’s sort of progressed as technology has developed. We’ve changed our processes, we’ve reduced costs, we’ve improved stability. Our damages have gone down where we have less than 1% damages over the 12 months.

So from the background that we work in, working with hardwood floors, we’re controlled by FFC, we’re trying to be as sustainable as we possibly can. So one of the key objectives we gave to Sean was to save us money on wrap, but also save CO2 emissions on the wrap as well, which we managed to save just over 78% on our CO2 emissions; going from over 20 tonne down to 4 tonne which is a massive saving, a massive help on the environment. And that is something that Castle strive to do and Havwoods strive to do; is try and reduce our impact on the environment. The association with Castle, they’ve come in, they’ve reviewed our full packaging, we’ve now got bespoke packaging onsite; Havwoods branded.

We’ve taken the next move with nano film which gave us a lot of product stabilisation. Our damages are down to less than 1% over the 12 month period and that is through working closely with Sean, working closely with Castle and as new innovations come out, we try and move with the time where we can, whether it’s upgrading machinery, upgrading films, packaging lines.

And we’ve made a massive saving over the last 4 years on packaging, but more importantly, we’ve secured the product and damages came down.“