Our Story
With 45 years of manufacturing in New Zealand, our history was inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of the Motor Industry.
We started out in 1970, making Replacement Car Carpets for an array of Austin’s / Ford’s / Chevy’s and Holden’s, to name but a few. This was when the mechanic would fix your car’s leak by removing the bungs in the floor.
Car Sales grew & grew, and so do the huge variety of Cars, Vans. Trucks and Utes that we made Carpets for. We continued to make them the traditional way, by cutting the carpet to patterns and sewing it to shape. This was the era when most cars had engines/transmissions rebuilt, rust repaired and re-painted, and the interior upholstery and carpets replaced, at least 2-3 times during the cars life.
Also the pub shut at 6pm and shops didn’t open weekends – aaghhh the good life?????
In 1989 Japanese Used Imports started to arrive with Cedric’s, Familia’s and Gloria’s to name but a few, never mind we could make carpets for these as well.
In 1995 we decided to install our own Carpet plant, so we could make all our carpet in house, and control the quality, delivery and styles of carpet we required. Then we added the Heat moulded Carpets, which didn’t require any sewing. Not long after this we started to supply some carpets for the Ford and Nissan Assembly Plants.
NZ’s Deregulation was well underway and Car Assembly was a casualty, lucky we had been pushing hard into the Car Mat market, and were already supplying a number of the Motor Companies and many Car Dealers nationwide.
Our latest transformation came via the Christchurch earthquakes. A Carpet Underlay factory there was damaged during the earthquakes but the plant and machinery wasn’t, so we decided to buy everything and relocate it to Auckland. Lucky we decided quickly, as some hurdles proved more challenging than envisioned. However after a huge engineering effort and some 4 months later, we were up and running, producing our 1st container of Underlay, for export to Australia.
We strongly believe in manufacturing in NZ, and the advantages we gain from it. The employment and tax we provide, the knowledge / skills we acquire and retain, and the ingenuity we utilise to compete with high tech and low cost manufacturers, from anywhere in the world. Our continual investment in new machinery and our Kiwi Ingenuity to think outside the box, allow us to be very flexible and change with the constantly shifting market forces of the world today.