Murray 50th Anniversary Q&A with Andy Bass: Part 2

This year marks 50 years of the Murray brand. To commemorate this milestone, our Content Marketing Specialist Angie Weisgal sat down with our Business Development Director Andy Bass for a two part interview to talk about Murray history. In this part, we’ll be focusing on the present and future of Murray. You can read part one here.

Angie: What does a typical day at work look like for you?

Andy: My role in the business is basically two hats. One is business development, which is essentially finding out where the contacts that we want to reach that we won’t be able to reach necessarily by phone or e-mail, finding out where they’re going, linking up with them at events, talking to them, getting a conversation going, developing interest in Murray and then passing warm leads on to the sales team.

The other side of my workday is what falls under ESG. There’s quite a lot that falls under environmental, social and governance. So, we’ve obviously got sustainability as a big piece in there, compliance within the business is a big piece in there. So that would be not only legal compliance but also ISO standards the business requires and any other certifications which the business require, I’d be responsible for that.

We also look after other stuff under governance like utilities and insurance and all that good stuff that nobody particularly wants to do but must be done.

Angie: What motivates you?

Andy: Clothing. I’m passionate about clothing and passionate about producing beautifully crafted garments that I know people will love wearing day in, day out.

Angie: What’s your favourite thing about Murray?

Andy: Well, everybody in the business knows that, and my favourite thing about Murray is the heritage story. I think it’s a great story and I know that customers relate to it and they like hearing it. Everyone loves a good story, and we have a very good story there.

Angie: What is Murray’s biggest success story?

Andy: Well, it’s an interesting one. They kind of come in waves, the success stories. So, in the initial days, it would have been winning those first few contracts to supply security uniform to those manufacturing plants.

Then we had some big breaks along the way. In the late 80s, early 90s, we began what’s now known as manpack or wearer pack. We were the original company that formulated that method of supply, which companies found so useful. Up to that point, no one’s uniform arrived packed per wearer. We developed that and we helped basically take the headache away of uniform supply.

So we started winning contracts for quite large organisations like GKN. We won a big contract for GKN, one of the bigger contracts. And then we won big contracts for Brose, Faurecia, Staybrite and other auto manufacturers. Then we also had a real success with some facilities management companies like Carillion and they took over all the London hospitals, facilities departments. Every hospital they took over, We went in on the back of them and supplied all the uniforms. So that would be all the uniform for the cleaners, caretakers, engineers, plant managers, cooks, and chefs. We supplied all the uniform and it took away the headache for a company like that. They knew they could pick up contracts and that we would manage the uniform in totality for them. See it was there, rolled out in time for when the contract date began.

Then lastly, we’ve obviously had some further successes, more recent ones included when we started getting into the big retail scene. So like B&Q and Wickes. Good examples there and then more recently still with probably our best win recently, is obviously the Jaguar Land Rover global contract for uniform.

Angie: What’s the biggest challenge that Murray has overcome?

Andy: I would say the biggest challenge that we overcame was when we realised in the early 90s that sourcing from the UK was no longer going to be viable from cost point of view or an economic point of view. So at the time we didn’t have any Far East or overseas connections, so it was a major disruption and shift in the whole business model. We had to find factories in the Far East that could actually work and would be prepared to work to our level of quality.

We went in a few directions that didn’t prove profitable. We had a brief foray into school uniform, a brief foray into club uniform like bowling clubs and things like that, but they really didn’t work out well because they were serving an individual customer at those clubs, rather than a business. So really, they took up an awful lot of time for very little return. So yeah, we had a few false starts, which we had to back out of as soon as we could.

We started initially by sending out all our own patterns, all our own fabrics from here and having the manufacturing done out of these factories. Then once we established relationships with the factories and gained confidence in their abilities, we let them do more and more. So eventually we let them source trims, fusings, and the internal parts of the garments. And then finally, we’d let them source the fabrics as well. But yes, that was a real considerable challenge to overcome.

Angie: How did the whole Science of Uniform^® get started?

Andy: Yes, that’s a very interesting part of the business. We have always known anecdotally that a great uniform that fits and flows with body movement, that’s made in fabrics that will really respond well to a given environment and keep the wearer comfortable either warm enough or cool enough has an impact on the wearer and contributed to wearer happiness. We could prove it anecdotally. We have a lot of case studies and quotes from customers complimenting us, saying how much they love the uniform, but we had nothing in hard numbers.

So back in 2019, our marketing department commissioned a study with Coventry University. We had already begun work with Coventry University on the design side of the company because Coventry University had quite a large design school within the university and they used to send their students to us to get some real commercial life experience by coming in here and working here for two or three weeks. So we’ve got an established relationship with the university, and we took this challenge to them.

They said, this looks like a really interesting piece of research. And they looked around, and globally they couldn’t find another research piece that had looked at the correlation between a great well-fitting uniform and employee happiness and wellbeing in a role. So they picked it up and we got that going. That piece of research was phenomenally successful, and we know how successful it is because most of our competitors now quote the statistics that we came out with from that research. It’s now universally accepted truth. So our unique Science of Uniform^® has been an absolute major plank of our success.

Angie: What’s next for Murray?

Andy: We’ve got a long-term goal clearly set out on a route planner for our journey which takes us to 2040. By 2040 we want 10 million wearers globally enjoying Murray Uniforms every day. Global expansion is happening as we speak and that is really the story for the next 10 to 15 years, to increase that global expansion. And so that we can ensure we hit that 10 million wearers mark by 2040.

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