Last autumn we talked to Rod Parker and Kate Owen at Gwalia Healthcare about the tremendous work being undertaken by the Treforest-based business to deal with the pandemic whilst recovering from a major flood just prior – from stepping in to fulfil sanitisation and contamination control needs across all sectors of the economy, to taking new concepts to commercialisation in medical device manufacturing. 

Five months on, we caught up with Rod and Kate to see how the company has developed through a winter that’s posed further challenges to many businesses across Wales and the UK …

“Product-wise, we’re very excited to be partnering with Hybrisan and their advanced sanitiser, as it’s alcohol-free and provides ongoing pathogenic protection to treat both surfaces and hands. We’re also now a key UK distributor for Graco SaniSpray HP disinfectant sprayers, which is an incredibly efficient and consistent airless spraying solution to handle any disinfecting and sanitising job. We’re able to offer Hybrisan in both the manufacturer packaging or bespoke, so it can become part of a complete contamination control solution – something that’s a big part of the Gwalia philosophy which can be encapsulated in the Hybrisphere for total protection against the pandemic as the economy prepares to come out of lockdown”.
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The growth included diversifying into new services, with the addition of a Decontamination Team that provides 24/7 certified sanitising application to high-profile contracts including the elite sports sector such as Parc-y-Scarlets.

​“Our growth and drive for continual improvement has seen us invest heavily in new machinery and cleanroom capability – with 11 new machines arriving here at Treforest. This includes new top of the range Fanuc injection moulding lines to cope with the surging demand for the Geko, a wearable electrostimulation device. In addition, new injection blow moulding and extrusion blow moulding machines are arriving weekly.
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These machines are electric rather than hydraulic, making them much more efficient, radically reducing energy consumption. A single electric injection moulding machine, for example, uses 1.4kW of energy every hour, less than half the energy needed to boil a household kettle once! This investment has been vital in enabling us to meet increased demand across all divisions of the business – but it’s also good to know that they’re reducing our carbon footprint too.

“As a result of the last year’s flooding, we recognised a need to protect the business by investing in Flood Defences across our facility. These were constructed last autumn by Swansea-based Lakeside Flood Solutions Ltd. and means that all the access points are now protected through a state-of-the-art panel system, as well as two submersible pump systems. It’s given everyone in our team even more confidence for the future – and allows us to focus on delivering to our customers, developing our product offerings and growing our market presence further.”
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Rod added; Very few SME’s will have made such progress in the face of massive challenge in just 12 months. All divisions of the business are seeing significant growth as we continue to invest in new capacity, personnel and the facility. In turn this will increase jobs and local supply chains with the hope of bringing health and well-being to our community.” 
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We look forward to seeing what the next 6 months will bring but things we can be confident of are that; Gwalia will continue to go from strength to strength, and that Rod and his team will do that in a way that’s good for the company, good for the community and good for the environment.

Rod Parker, MD of medical and pharmaceutical products manufacturer Gwalia Healthcare, is a strong believer in buying local. He extends his doctrine of supporting local supply chains into every aspect of the privately owned Treforest business.

​Gwalia is the largest independent manufacturer of child proof bottle tops in the UK, but there’s a lot more to the business than that. In recent years it has diversified into making a wide range of pharmaceutical packaging, as well as medical devices. And since the start of the Covid pandemic it has also been making and filling hand sanitiser bottles and decontamination products.


The benefits of buying local 

​One of Gwalia’s latest ventures is the development of a non-alcohol hand gel, using a technology developed by a Port Talbot-based company, Hybrisan. It’s typical of Gwalia that it should have found another South Wales business with which to partner.

Rod thinks that large firms should be given incentives to buy from smaller supply chain businesses in their local area. For him personally, it seems the knowledge he’s putting something into his local community is encouragement enough.
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All businesses of course have to make commercial decisions about their suppliers. For Rod Parker and his team at Gwalia Healthcare, it seems, commercial decisions go hand in hand with other considerations in a way that’s good for the company, good for the community and good for the environment.

2020 has been a challenging year for most businesses. For Gwalia Healthcare, it’s been doubly so. There’s been Covid-19, of course. But just weeks before the lockdown, the Valleys firm was struck by a devastating flood as a result of Storm Dennis.

In overcoming these challenges and emerging stronger and more resilient, the team at Gwalia have shown creativity, adaptability and a tenacious spirit. This is the story of how they achieved it.


Storm Dennis

It was on February 13 that the floodwaters unleashed by Storm Dennis rushed through Gwalia’s Treforest factory. At the time the company had just reached an important stage in its development, having had customers invested in new automated machinery to deliver Geko and Firefly, sophisticated medical devices designed to prevent deep vein thrombosis and treat sports injuries. 

​The devices would take the company, which had previously focused on making child proof tops for medicine bottles and tamper resistant pharmaceutical and nutritional packaging, into a new market. But on February 13 all that was put in jeopardy.

It took four hours for the bulk of the floodwater to drain out of the factory halls unassisted, and several more hours to sweep the rest out. Then came initially two weeks followed by a further 4 weeks of lifting, cleaning and repairing the machinery to get it into a fit state. In the meantime, hand assembly units were used to ensure customers experienced no break in supplies.


Covid-19 and a new direction

After six weeks production at Gwalia was back in full swing and the company was ordering new machinery. Then along came Covid-19. It could have sent Gwalia back to the drawing board again. Instead, it brought fresh opportunity. This time the company was inundated, not with the muddy waters of the Taff, but with orders for empty bottles and bottle tops for hand sanitisers – 120 million in 24 hours.

Starting off with a borrowed machine, Rod put three of his staff to work filling sanitiser bottles, 5,000 a shift initially. Within two weeks he had acquired a filling machine and a labelling machine from Amarda Industries a south wales based business, allowing him to increase volume.
Gwalia designed and developed a new 100ml squeezable bottle. The team went from three to 10, then went onto two shifts. Contracts came from Arco, the largest supplier of sanitiser gel to the NHS and local authorities, and from NHS England. New product lines were developed, including 1-litre bottles with pumps for the NHS. 

On the back of these contracts Gwalia invested in a second, fully automated line and developed a full range of bottles, from 50ml all the way up to 5 litres. The one line can produce 30,000 filled 1-litre bottles a day the other 150,000 of the smaller ones. Those numbers could be rapidly doubled with a very small investment, says Rod. 

Far from having to furlough staff as so many businesses have, Gwalia took on an extra 26 during the worst of the pandemic, and still employs 26 more than before the lockdown on March. It’s testimony to the new market position Gwalia has carved out for itself as a result of its hard work and adaptability.

Alcohol-free gels
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While the alcohol-based gels met an urgent need, Rod quickly realised they weren’t the answer for everyone. Gwalia has been working with a Port Talbot-based company called Hybrisan on a range of non-alcohol anti-microbial and biocidal products which Rod describes as “95% water and 5% clever technology.”

The fully tested and certified products have a proven quick-kill rate and residual kill, and are not harmful to the skin. They will be going through clinical trials to validate any clinical claims put towards them.

As well as gels, Gwalia has also developed a range of decontamination products such as sprays with Hybrisan, which are being used by companies such as Stagecoach.

2020 has been a testing year for Gwalia, as it has for most of us. As a company it has risen to the challenge, which is a tribute to the hard work of its largely local workforce and the creativity of its management.

Without that flexibility and talent for improvisation they have shown, Gwalia might have been sunk by Storm Dennis or failed to meet the demands placed on it by the Covid crisis. Instead it has triumphed, and is poised to continue serving its community even better than it did before.

If you have medicine bottles in your kitchen or bathroom cabinet, there’s a good chance they have child proof tops made by a South Wales company. 

Treforest-based Gwalia Healthcare makes around 20% of the child proof bottle tops in the UK. That, in itself, would be a substantial undertaking. But Gwalia also makes a wide variety of other lifesaving products, from hand sanitiser bottles and decontamination sprays to sophisticated medical devices. It’s a story of diversification in adversity that can provide inspiration to other businesses in these difficult times. 

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Early Years

Gwalia Healthcare, based in Treforest, was founded in 1968 and was originally called Dragon Plastics. It is a 100% privately owned company, still controlled by the family of one of the founders, Dennis Parker. 

The present MD, Rod Parker, is the third generation of Parkers to run the company. Rod’s grandfather and his co-founders set up Dragon Plastics as a custom moulder of plastic injection mouldings and assemblies. Its first customer was the global scientific supplies company Thermo Fisher, then called Motil and still with the firm 52 years later.

Rod’s father Ian joined the company in 1982, around the time Dragon designed what was to become probably its most important product, child resistant tops for medicine bottles. Ian Parker designed pictorial rather than written instructions on the bottle tops. Raised in London’s South End, he appreciated that not all users would be able to read instructions in English.

The company remains the only independent manufacturer of child proof bottle tops in the UK, but in 1996 it received a body blow. The government decided that solid dose no longer needed to be supplied in bottles with child resistant tops; they could be sold in blister packs instead.

Overnight, Dragon Plastics lost 50% of its business. It was a difficult time for Rod, aged 21, to join the family firm. “I joined the company when it was at an all-time low,” he said. 

In order to gain all-round knowledge of the business, Rod worked in various parts of the firm, spending time and gaining experience in logistics, quality control and sales. After 3 years of business development he was made sales director after winning some sizeable sales contracts. 


Diversification 

In 2006 his father was taken ill and Rod, aged just 26, took over as MD. With its core business under pressure, it was time for Gwalia to diversify. “I quickly realised we needed to be selling something more than just bottle tops,” he said. 

In 2007 a bottle manufacturer called Riverside Plastics went into administration, having lost most of its business supplying complimentary toiletry bottles to the hotel sector in the fall-out after 9/11. At the time Dragon was making 350 million bottle tops a year. By acquiring Riverside, Gwalia could add bottle making to its repertoire and expand into a wider range of medical, pharmaceutical and nutritional packaging. 

Within three months of buying Riverside Gwalia had a contract with Sainsbury’s designing a child resistant, tamper evident range of vitamin packs. The Sainsbury’s contract was followed by ones with Superdrug and Tesco, until within 10 years the company had captured 72% of the UK vitabiotic packaging market. 

Gwalia also bought a toolmaking business and now manufactures all its own injection moulding and extrusion blow moulding tools to its own in-house design, saving money and lead times on tooling.


The move into medical devices

The next stage in the company’s evolution came one day in 2015 when Rod was in hospital. Looking at some of the medical devices around him, he got to thinking about how the Gwalia could get into the sector. He spent six months studying other companies in the sector, and decided Gwalia was going to take a different approach.

The company’s first medical equipment contract was with Sky Medical Technology, for a pair of devices called geko and firefly. They’re wristwatch-sized devices that are worn at the knee and stimulate the peroneal nerve to increase blood flow in the lower leg, to prevent deep vein thrombosis and reduce swelling after sports injuries. It works by sending an electronic pulse to simulate your body walking and two thirds walking pace.

By the beginning of 2020 Gwalia Healthcare had established itself as a company making a wide range of products, from child proof bottle tops and pharmaceutical packaging to medical devices such as geko and firefly. The company had ridden out one threat to its business from the change in policy on medical packaging, by diversifying its product range and seeking new markets.
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It was a lesson well learnt, because in 2020 Gwalia would face further shocks to its business from events outside its control. What happened next was to test all the resourcefulness and creativity the company could muster.

Originally published online by Business News Wales CARDIFF CAPITAL REGION , 19th October 2020.

https://businessnewswales.com/gwalia-healthcare-shows-how-to-win-through-diversification/