SBS Trailers: Ingenuity, Innovation, Family Values & Good Old Fashioned British Manufacturing

As soon as you walk into SBS Trailers' Wolverhampton factory, you know you're somewhere special. It's what you imagine a proper factory should look like; there are huge chains dangling from the ceiling, steel bars getting cut and bent, forklift trucks shuttling back and forth, while welding torches crackle and pop pretty much constantly. Grease-streaked burly dudes in hi-vis are MAKING THINGS, and they're making them out of STEEL. It feels old-fashioned and hi-tech all at the same time and reminds you that, here at least, they really do make 'em like they used to.

Once upon a time, a scene like this wouldn't have been that unusual in this corner of the Midlands. It was, after all, the heartland of British manufacturing. Large-scale British industry has declined in recent decades, and many similar businesses have long since been shuttered, but SBS continues to thrive.

What started in 1959 as a fledgling enterprise making "small boat supplies" (hence name SBS) gradually expanded into what you see today - a sprawling complex of buildings where premium boat trailers are made.

Whenever we start working with a new client, we're clear about one thing. No cameras get picked up until we know which story we're trying to tell. Every company has one - sometimes the process of finding it is easy, sometimes it's a little trickier. But it's always there somewhere.

In the case of SBS Trailers, the story came together very easily. This is a family business, a company born of ingenuity and innovation, from a time when people didn't just buy stuff, they made it.

Andy Wyer runs it now, having taken it over from his dad (and founder). And now a third generation of Wyers have joined that list - daughter Lucy runs logistics and processes the orders alongside dad in the office, while son Joe heads up factory-floor operations.

At its heart, it's still the same business that it always was. Entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, expertise, family values and good old fashioned British manufacturing are the raw materials. What comes out at the other end is simple: the finest quality British boat trailers money can buy.

There's an old saying that people don't buy from companies, they buy from people. Spending time at SBS made me realise how true that saying is. When you spend time with the Wyer family, when you see how they build their products, how their whole operation works, you realise that, yes, these are the people I want to buy my boat trailer from.

It also reminded me of something. Every business is interesting in its own way. You might think you're not interested in boat trailers (or launderettes, estate agents, whatever), but when you get a chance to draw back the curtain and see the intricacies of how a business is run, you find there's another world there. If you look hard enough (and sometimes you don't have to look very hard at all), there's always a story waiting to be told.

We tried to capture a little of that in this video: