HALL-FAST EXTEND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP

Photo; Hall-Fast Managing Director Malk Hall with 3 of Sherwood’s new recruits Chris Perceval, Cameron Stewart, and Rick Wilde. 

Sherwood Wolf Hunt are delighted to announce an extended partnership with Mansfield based industrial supplies giant Hall-Fast. The new partnership will see Hall-Fast feature front and centre on the club’s open age playing shirts, as well as on the Junior and Women’s team kits for 2021 and 2022. 

Hall-Fast are no strangers at the Debdale Park club, having first supported the growth of the Junior Hunters programme in 2019. impressed at the ambition of the club they’ve now committed to supporting and helping the club to grow further in North Nottinghamshire.

Club Chairman Adam Bates said “We’re very proud to be working with very well respected Mansfield businesses such as Hall-Fast. The support from Malk and Rachel (Hall) has been fantastic, and extends way beyond sponsorship of kit and equipment. Their passion for developing grass roots sports is like nothing i’ve seen before and we’re made up that they’ve joined our mission to develop the sport of rugby league at Debdale Park.”

Hall-Fast Managing Director Malk Hall said “I’ve been very impressed with what the Wolf Hunt have done both on and off the pitch, Hall-Fast support numerous community based initiatives and I want to help Adam and his team and be part of the growth of the club from Little Ruggers and the Junior Hunters through to the Men and Women’s senior teams”

Wolf Hunt join a long list of sports teams that have been supported by Hall-Fast’s community support initiatives which include Nottingham Rugby, Sheffield Steelers, and Mansfield Town to name a few.

Hall-Fast was founded in August 2006 and has become one of the regions fastest growing companies, and one of the most successful in its sector. They boast a range of 175,000-plus products, including leading brands such as Karcher, Helly Hansen, Snickers and Scruffs.

Hall-Fast Starts New Firm and Donates to NHS with Every Sale!

Source Control Masks Ltd has been launched today as a trading name of Hall-Fast Industrial Supplies Limited

 

On launch the Mansfield based firm has announced that they intend to promote clear messages on the use of masks whilst also raising much needed money for the NHS by donating £5 for every pack of five masks purchased online

 

The Original Source Control Mask is a reusable and washable mask, it is not a PPE mask that is meant for healthcare workers and the message is ‘My mask protects you and your mask protects me’ an initial 25,000 black Source Control Masks are on order and will be available to despatch to customers around the 10th May, pre-orders can be placed online now to reserve stock for you and your family.

 

Malcolm Hall – Managing Director said  ‘Just a few weeks ago I really wasn’t sure if Hall-Fast would survive a few months however we were approved for a government backed Business Interruption Loan via NatWest and this has not only secured Hall-Fast’s existence it has given me my mojo back’

 

‘I really do feel like both businesses are new start-ups’’ ‘there has been a lot of graft and very long hours put in but within just six days we are up and running and already taking pre-orders online, initially we are selling the Source Control Masks in black however other colours will be available to pre-order online in the coming weeks ’

 

Hall-Fast have been supplying PPE for 15 years and have been following developments around the World, since the outbreak of Covid-19 there has been a huge global surge in demand for PPE items with limited stocks available for frontline workers, it is important that businesses and the public do not wear a PPE mask that is meant for an healthcare worker, on Tuesday this week Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon advised people to wear a face coverings to help limit the spread of Covid-19 and it is widely anticipated that when lock down restrictions are eased similar advice will be given out across the UK.

 

’Hall-Fast are a family business and we are well known locally for giving back to the community I guess it’s part of our makeup, we have been given a life-line and we want to help both our local Kings Mill and Mansfield Community Hospital charity and also the national NHS Charities Together by raising a significant amount of money for them and also by promoting very clear messages on the use of masks’

For further information on Source Control Masks or to pre-order your Source Control Masks online visit www.sourcecontrolmasks.co.uk

Hall-Fast 13th Birthday

Rapid Growth for Mansfield Industrial Supplies Firm

 

Anglia Way based Hall-Fast are celebrating a record breaking year with sales 28% up on the previous year.

The family business was set up from a back bedroom on the 1st August 2006 and now has a standard range of 610,000 items which are supplied Globally into 110 overseas markets, export sales accounted for 15% with online sales being 40% of turnover

Hall-Fast’s online search impression share within the period was third highest behind Global giants Amazon and eBay and much higher than many other multi-national competitors in the UK giving the company huge opportunities for future expansion within UK markets when an aggressive strategy to increase market share is implemented.

Owner Malcolm Hall highlights the firms huge investment in a new website with an integrated ERP solution as the foundation to this success. He said “the future has never been brighter for us, we have a very healthy order book and the infrastructure in place that can accommodate our plans for 30% growth year on year and I would like to thank our customers, suppliers and community partners as we enter our 14th year of trading’’

For additional information on Hall-Fast visit www.hall-fast.com

Wolf Hunt Partnership

Local Rugby League club Sherwood Wolf Hunt are delighted to announce a new partnership with Mansfield based Hall-Fast Industrial Supplies.

 

Hall-Fast are an award winning family business based in Mansfield. They are one of the fastest growing businesses in Nottinghamshire, and are a well-respected market leader in the supply of industrial goods.

The partnership see’s Hall-Fast become the main sponsor of the clubs Junior Rugby League programme, which has been developed to introduce Juniors aged 9-16 into the sport, which is traditionally played in Yorkshire and the North West of England.

 

On the partnership, Malcolm Hall MBE, Owner and Managing Director of Hall-Fast said “We’re moving into our 8th year of involvement with our North Nottinghamshire Community Partnership with Nottingham Rugby which has introduced thousands of juniors from the age of 2 years old to rugby union, and we’re proud to add another community club to the list of clubs that we’re supporting tin and around Mansfield and further afield.

 

We’re very keen to be involved with the growth of Junior Rugby League, in what is the first programme of its kind to have taken place in Mansfield. As a proud Yorkshireman, Rugby League is a sport I grew up with and I’m keen to see the sport develop outside the heartlands. This is just the start of our partnership with Sherwood, and we’re looking forward to a continued partnership in the coming years”.

 

Hall-Fast are no strangers to the community rugby scene, having been involved with Mansfield Rugby Club, and currently heavily involved in Nottingham Paviors, with a clear focus on developing Junior rugby from mini’s, right through to the open age set up. As well as supporting community sports, Hall-Fast are established partners with some well-known professional sporting organisations such as Mansfield Town FC, Nottingham Rugby, and Southwell Racecourse.

 

Commenting on the new partnership, Sherwood Wolf Hunt Chairman Adam Bates commented “We are of course delighted to have Malk and his team on board, and already we’re benefiting from their support. They have a proven track record of supporting clubs to develop and I’m confident that with their support and guidance, we can continue to go from strength to strength.”

 

Only 5 years old, Sherwood have grown rapidly into one of the Midlands strongest Rugby League clubs, and will this year field two open age teams, an Under 17’s, 15’s, 13’s and 11’s.

 

For more information on Sherwood’s Junior summer rugby programme, you can visit https://wolfhuntrl.class4kids.co.uk/login or www.wolfhuntrl.co.uk.

WELDING FUME EXTRACTION – HSE Bulletin No. STSU1-2019

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued a bulletin (No. STSU1-2019) on the 7th February 2019 warning of new scientific evidence from the International Agency for Research on Cancer that exposure to mild steel welding fumes can cause lung cancer and possibly kidney cancer in humans.

The Workplace Health Expert Committee has endorsed the reclassification of mild steel welding fume as a human carcinogen.

Subsequently and with immediate effect, there is a strengthening of HSE’s enforcement expectation for all welding fume, including mild steel welding; because general ventilation does not achieve the necessary control.

The Health and Safety Executive safety alert can be viewed here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/safetybulletins/mild-steel-welding-fume.htm

Immediate action is required now to ensure that employees, workers, employers, owners, managers and directors or contractors’ undertaking welding activities in any industry are aware of the risks, expectations, outcomes and actions that are now required, as detailed below:

Outcome:

-Control of the cancer risk will require suitable engineering controls for all welding activities indoors e.g. Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV). Extraction will also control exposure to manganese, which is present in mild steel welding fume, which can cause neurological effects similar to Parkinson’s disease.

-Where LEV alone does not adequately control exposure, it should be supplemented by adequate and suitable respiratory protective equipment (RPE) to protect against the residual fume.

-Appropriate RPE should be provided for welding outdoors. You should ensure welders are suitably instructed and trained in the use of these controls.

-Regardless of duration, HSE will no longer accept any welding undertaken without any suitable exposure control measures in place, as there is no known level of safe exposure.

-Risk assessments should reflect the change in the expected control measures.

Action required:

-Make sure exposure to any welding fume released is adequately controlled using engineering controls (typically LEV).

-Make sure suitable controls are provided for all welding activities, irrelevant of duration. This includes welding outdoors.

-Where engineering controls alone cannot control exposure, then adequate and suitable RPE should be provided to control risk from any residual fume.

-Make sure all engineering controls are correctly used, suitably maintained and are subject to thorough examination and test where required.

-Make sure any RPE is subject to an RPE programme. An RPE programme encapsulates all the elements of RPE use you need to ensure that your RPE is effective in protecting the wearer.

Clearly welding and cutting can be extremely dangerous if you are not correctly protected, there are a variety of chemicals which when melted can create dangerous substances. The dangerous substances and radiation generated during the welding process can be extremely hazardous to a welders’ health.

There are a variety of brands including Kemper, Parweld and Electac which provide protective equipment for welders. Our largest supplier of welding and cutting protection is Kemper who are pioneers and a leader in the technology of the welding smoke extraction industry

If you require guidance or assistance on what welding fume extraction system is suitable for your requirements please call us (01623) 645 645 or email us on [email protected]

Hall-Fast’s Department for International Trade Export Success Profile

Tell us about your company?

Based in Mansfield Hall-Fast are a proud family business which I started from the back bedroom of the family home in August 2006, we have come a long way since and now supply a standard range of 200,000 items (650,000+ part numbers) to a growing customer base of 45,000+ companies in 92 overseas markets.

Our rapid growth has been based on supplying SME’s and large manufacturing and wholesale customers Worldwide backed with an online based business model which enables us to keep our costs low and therefore pass on huge savings to our customers on the industrial supplies and equipment, specialist fasteners, workwear, tools, PPE and janitorial items which they were purchasing from our large multinational competitors.

Tell us briefly about your export history?

At the height of the recession in 2009 when our core UK markets were depressed, with the guidance and support of the DIT I decided to diversify and start to export as I saw this as a huge opportunity for us, the traditional route to exporting within our sectors was to undertake market visits and set up commercial agreements with local distributors however we neither had the time or the finance to do this.

I foresaw the huge growth in the internet that we see today so we initially focussed on adding as much technical information on our products to our website, added part numbers within our titles and added keywords to product pages and we made it clear to potential customers overseas that we could export our product ranges globally and importantly we took the decision to supply companies directly and not via local distributors subsequently our prices were very competitive and we started to see enquiries and sales coming through almost immediately; this approach was pretty pioneering and proven to be very successful for us.

What have been the main challenges and breakthroughs?

We have overcome a few major challenges since I started the business, firstly the recession of 2008 and then back in December 2016 we had a huge setback when development work on our old website caused unrepairable damaged, at the time we had twelve multilingual international websites which were linked into the one database backend, we had huge issues with prices on our international websites being different to the UK website and we also lost years of organic search listings when the Location Based Indexing hreflang tag on our UK website www.hall-fast.com was changed to tell Google to show our Irish website to visitors in the UK.

In January 2017 I took the decision to invest heavily in a new Magento based website with a fully integrated Datafile ERP software system, this decision has really pushed the business forward as our website is now fully integrated with our accounts, stock, CRM and order processing making it almost fully automated, this means that we can process an unlimited amount of orders quickly enabling us to aggressively target markets sectors Worldwide.

Over the last six months sales have grown by 87 per cent with export sales accounting for circa 40 per cent.

What single piece of advice would you give to someone looking to export?

There are huge opportunities for UK SME’s to export but I think that potential new exporters are put off as they believe it to be difficult, trading overseas is as easy as trading within the UK, however no two overseas markets are the same so it is important to understand the trading terms and the documentation requirements for each enquiry or order that they receive, the DIT are always on hand to assist as are the Chamber of Commerce with this support the opportunities in overseas markets are endless.

For more info, visit www.hall-fast.com or https://www.insidermedia.com/blogs/midlands/business-matters-trading-internationally-challenges-and-breakthroughs 

HALL-FAST EXTEND COMMUNITY PROJECTS DEAL WITH NOTTINGHAM RUGBY!

Nottingham Rugby is pleased to announce the renewal of its community projects partnership with East Midlands-based award-winning industrial supplies specialists, Hall-Fast.

This renewed partnership, which will run until 2022, allows for the continuation of the North Notts Community Partnership at Fountaindale SEN School and Ravenshead Church of England School.

Hall-Fast | Nottingham Rugby Gold Sponsor Hall-Fast Managing Director Malcolm Hall MBE said: “I am very proud that over the last seven years Hall-Fast have been able to support Nottingham Rugby’s Community Department in the delivery of high-quality rugby to tens of thousands of youngsters in Nottinghamshire.

“I am especially proud of the huge success of Little Ruggers, which has helped to introduce both boys and girls to rugby whilst also bringing back ex-players to the sport. I am really looking forward to working closely with Steve Smith and his community team over the next four years.”

Little Ruggers is a family-focused community programme aimed at getting children aged 2-5 playing rugby with their parents. The sessions cost just £2 and there is no need to book prior, just turn up, pick up a ball and play.

Steve Smith, Chief Operations Officer at Nottingham Rugby said: “We are delighted to have secured the support of Hall-Fast until 2022.

“Their work has helped to increase the opportunities for children within Nottinghamshire to gain access to rugby sessions and in turn has helped to grow the sport of rugby throughout the county.

“I very much look forward to seeing how the partnership progresses in the future and seeing the sport flourish across Nottinghamshire as a result.”

The Nottingham Rugby Little Ruggers scheme relaunched at Paviours Rugby Club on Sunday 30th September at 10am and will run every Sunday throughout the season.

For more information on Nottingham Rugby’s community programmes, visit www.nottinghamrugby.co.uk.

For more information about Hall-Fast Industrial Supplies, head to our website here.

Hall-Fast Founder to Have Influential Say in Parliament

Hall-Fast’s founder and Managing Director Malcolm Hall has been invited to join the All-Party Parliamentary Corporate Responsibility Group (APCRG)

Hall-Fast were recently chosen as the Mansfield Constituency Responsible Business Champion by local MP Ben Bradley and subsequently were named in the top 20 UK responsible businesses alongside sports clubs and major multi-national companies including overall winner BAE Systems.

The APCRG group’s purpose is to promote debate and understanding of corporate responsibility, by holding events each year in which the current 94 Parliamentarians and 80 non-Parliamentarians can exchange views on relevant, topical issues, recent meetings have covered subjects such as business-education partnerships; inclusive employment policies; health and well-being in the workplace; responsible investment; employee engagement and well-being; corporate reputation and risk; corporate reporting; and the use of procurement policies to promote responsible behaviour. Future meetings will focus re- skilling Britain t-levels, work placements, apprenticeships & other skills training.

Commenting Malcolm said – ‘’As a relatively small independent family run business I am immensely proud that the success of Hall-Fast has enabled us to give back to the communities in and around Mansfield and further afield through community based sponsorship with sports clubs including Paviors Rugby and Nottingham Rugby’s Community Department where delivery of high quality coaching into primary and secondary schools and also Mansfield’s Fountaindale SEN school has helped to promote rugby locally and also the benefits of an healthy lifestyle and wellbeing, and I look forward to being able to have the platform to put across my views within this parliamentary group.

In March 2017 Malcolm was appointed as an Export Champion in an ambassadorial role by the Cabinet Office to promote exporting to other SME’s and was made an MBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours for his services to business.

Pictured: Images from over the last 12 years

Mansfield Firm Has Record-breaking Year!

Anglia Way based industrial supplies firm Hall-Fast are celebrating a record year as they start their 13th year of trading today 1st August 2018.

Pictured: Images from over the last 12 years

Pictured: Images from over the last 12 years

The husband and wife run business began trading from a back bedroom of the family home on the 1st of August 2006 and has become one of the regions fastest growing industrial supplies firms.

Supplying a standard range of 600,000 items to a growing customer base in 92 overseas markets Hall-Fast achieved a 14% increase in sales from the previous year.

Commenting Hall-Fast founder and MD Malcolm Hall said “it’s fantastic that our huge investment in a new website and software system is starting to pay dividends, we went through a very tough period when our old website broke however our hard work and determination to never give up along with a significant investment in a new website and software system has enabled us to go to the next level”

Hall-Fast were recently named as one of twenty APCRG National Responsible Business Champions for their longstanding commitment to the communities in and around Mansfield.

Mansfield Industrial Supplies Firm Growing Rapidly!

Anglia Way-based Hall-Fast is celebrating a surge in sales both in the Uk and in overseas markets with the award-winning company enjoying its best ever June with sales a massive 76% up on the previous year.

Owner Malcolm Hall highlights the firms huge investment in a new website with an integrated ERP solution as the foundation to this success. He said “the future has never been brighter for us, back in December 2016 we had huge issues with our old website which basically broke, this affected our business dramatically so we had to move quickly and invest heavily in a new fully integrated ecommerce platform that could cope with our huge product portfolio, we have been re-building ever since, but over the last six months we are now growing rapidly and reaping the benefits”

Hall-Fast supplies a standard range of 200,000 items to a growing customer base in 92 overseas markets, sales in June into export markets including Germany, Poland, Ireland, Turkey, India, Mexico, the Netherlands and Nigeria helped to boost overall sales, with enquiries from overseas also increasing significantly, their scope of supply ranges from industrial equipment, tools, printed and embroidered workwear, PPE and consumables to specialist engineered fastenings.

For additional information on Hall-Fast’s comprehensive range please visit www.hall-fast.com call (01623) 645 645 or email [email protected]