Overtime Prospects Good For New Year - Firm has busy days ahead

The Rushden shoe firm of C. W. Horrell, Ltd, is a firm which understands its workers’ attitudes and goes out of its way to eliminate doubts about management policy.

When any situation arises which will involve special action and disturbance of routine working within the factory, a news-sheet is distributed among the operatives to tell them what to expect and why.

Knowing the reasons behind new proposals and reassured that all is well, the employees respond enthusiastically and the management achieves its aims without difficulty.

It is easy just to give out orders, however strange they may seem to others, and sit back waiting for results. To receive such orders is a different matter, for the wrong guess about the firm’s future policy can cause all sorts of doubts and unsettle a person’s mind.

“We think it is better to let everybody know what we are doing,” Mr. John C. Horrell, chairman of directors, told a reporter. “That way they have greater confidence and they know they are working for a definite purpose.”

As a result of a special visit to America by Mr. M. C. Knowles, managing director, and an attack on the U.S. market for orders, the past two months has produced more shoes for America than the previous year’s total output to that country.

Orders in 15,000 lots make a great impact and when a customer asks for a four weeks delivery period something drastic has to be done.

Problem

Faced with the problem of cutting down the normal 12-week period and concentrating all effort on to such an order, the management decided to lay off clickers for one day a week to avoid too great a build-up in the early stages, kept the closers working more or less normally and pushed the other operatives at a hard pace, with many hours overtime.

Before any of this policy was applied, the firm explained to all the workers the urgency of the situation and just why it was taking this action.

Afterwards one of the clickers stopped Mr. Knowles in the factory and thanked him for the explanation. He might have thought that his short time meant there were fewer orders, he said but now he realised what was happening and he had no doubts or fears for his future.

Overtime

More orders have come in and most workers in the factory can expect plenty of overtime in 1962.

In May Mr. Horrell and Mr. Knowles will make a Continental visit looking for new ideas and new outlets for their goods. Their ideas will not be from big shoe fairs in the various European capitals but from the shoe-making areas of France, from the French equivalents of towns like Rushden, Raunds, Wellingborough and Kettering.

In the actual manufacturing towns, Mr. Horrell believes there are many useful tips to be picked up and with Britain hoping to enter the Common Market the more advances in technique that can be made, the better.

Outlook rosy for Horrell's
BANG ON target and in some cases even above it. That is the happy position of Charles Horrell Shoes Ltd., of Rushden, find themselves in for the second half of last year.
Commented chairman John Horrell at the company's bi-annual conference at Crick earlier this month: "It has been an extremely successful year, even more so considering the extremely complicated internal re-organisation we have been through."
Salesmen from all over the United Kingdom attended the conference where for the first time, they met Horrell's new marketing and export sales manager, Mr. John Holland, who will be responsible for spearheading the company's export drive in the Common Market.
Mr. Horrell said: "This new appointment emphasises our intentions of expanding the export side of our business not only within the Common Market, but also in Commonwelatrt countries."

Remarkably
Reviewing sales outlets during the past year, Mr, Horrell said that major sales outlets were now the men's outfitters with a ratio of 70-30 in the London area and 55-45 for the rest of the country. As more and more retailers were now accepting Horrells fashion shoes, they could see the gap steadily narrowing.
Horrells has also installed a computer to deal with stock control and accounting. "In fact without re-organisation and modernisation we are looking forward to an even more successful 1973," said Mr. Horrell.
"Our increased concentration on fashion shoes has proved remarkably successful and within the next month, we will be showing another nine new designs to our customersthey were introduced at the conference.