Jeremy Lowes

The Lowes family has been involved in the laundry business since end of the 19th century.

The Lowes were neighbours of the Armstrongs in Northumberland and the records show that Jeremy Lowes’ grandfather, Edward Lowes, became company secretary of Armstrongs in 1898.

The company progressed to gain a distinguished record of introducing innovations to the British market. It moved into manufacture and in 1963 had installed the UK’s first fully automated washroom, which used equipment that was designed and manufactured by Armstrong.

Jeremy Lowes joined the company in 1969. He recalls that he had just returned from two years in Australia as a trainee farm manager but as that had not seemed to be the career he wanted, the family suggested that he should join the company.

He was immediately recruited to the installation team to learn the business. One of the first machines that the team installed was the Amazon tipping washer system – a 200lb washer that tipped backward for loading and forward for unloading and was linked to a conveyor system.

The Voss continuous batch washer, which the company introduced to the UK market in 1972, was another very important innovation which Lowes and the installation team worked on.

Lowes says that his own career within the company coincided with significant stages in its development. By 1978, when Armstrong celebrated its centenary, Jeremy Lowes had moved from installation to sales, in particular targeting the laundry markets in Scotland and Ireland and also becoming involved in export.

He explains that selling was much more to his taste than the technical side of the business although he acknowledges that the time there had been valuable in giving him a view of “the other side of the fence” and a general introduction to the industry.

When Lowes joined the sales team he “had never sold anything before” but once over the shock, he started to enjoy it.

The 1980s marked another critical stage in Armstrong’s development and in Lowes’ own career.

By now he had become managing director, after first serving as joint MD with his father who retired when the company moved from Perivale to Newbury.

Up to that time around 60% of the company’s sales was to hospital laundries but the drive to privatisation led to much of the hospital laundry work being outsourced and to a decline in sales in that sector.

Looking back, Jeremy Lowes feels that company benefited from this huge change in the laundry industry as it forced him to look at other markets.

With the move to Newbury he took the company into the OPL market in a big way.

“We hadn’t done this before because we felt that we would have been competing against our traditional customer,” he explains but adds that this idea wasn’t correct as the majority of OPL customers would not have gone to the commercial sector.

Building the OPL laundry side of the business was a natural move from the sales’ point of view.

Selling a tunnel washer is a complex task. It not only requires work from the supplier and the manufacturer but also needs a great deal of preparation including financial planning by the customer so the sales’ process is a long one. Tthe market had also become very competitive.

In contrast the OPL market is a much faster moving business as it is dealing with smaller investments and orders are obtained much more quickly.

The company sells both directly to the end user and through a large dealer network.

Provided the dealers are fully trained this network brings an enormous benefit to both parties.

So the two markets are separate and the OPL market has lived up to expectations.

But Lowes insists that the success of the OPL sales did not mean that he wanted the company to abandon the traditional industrial/commercial market. From his viewpoint the company had very strong links to those traditional manufacturers and suppliers, such as Lapauw and Huebsch.

The connection between Armstrong and these companies goes back a long way and there is much common ground as these, like Armstrong, were family-owned businesses when they started to work with Armstrong.

Naturally the move into OPL had brought a wider portfolio of brands.

One of these was Schulthess, which joined the Armstrong portfolio in 1998 and it was Armstrong that brought the Swiss manufacturer back to the UK market after an absence of many years.

In 2002 Armstrong became the distributor for Primus with its full range of high-speed washer-extractors.

Lowes’ drive to take the Armstrong company into fresh markets continued and in 2001 the company formed Armstrong France.

That, says Lowes, was quite an eye opener. The French subsidiary was formed as a result of Armstrong’s acquisition of a company that had previously been a distributor for a range of brands and Lowes saw similarities between that company and Armstrong Commercial Laundry Sysems.

The French company’s success had been largely gained in the coin-op and residential markets.

Armstrong’s coin-op business in France is different to that in the UK. Armstrong France works on the basis of a turnkey project and supplies not just the laundry machines but all the equipment – from CCTV to pay systems.

The French company has also been very successful in supplying the residential laundry market and sells through dealers and agents as well as directly.

Just before Jeremy Lowes talked to LCN the company marked a further achievement. It is now registered as a Dunn & Bradstreet Number One company.

Jeremy Lowes is proud to announce this as it signifies the company’s financial strength and stability in a very competitive market as it looks to the future.