Supporting ‘smarter ways of thinking’

One of the most notable things about the Kingsway Group – it soon transpired when I met with Julian Hall – is the speed both with which the company has grown, and carved out a strong reputation for innovative, high quality products in a highly competitive sector where a number of its counterparts have a considerably longer history. Although the Group’s roots go back to the early 1980s – when Gilbert Hall, the father of the company’s two main current-day owners, Ben and Julian Hall, established a small business selling locksets, card-swipe devices, and associated components in Beckenham – the thriving business that is Kingsway Group today has operated only since 2010. It was in that year that the two brothers took the business by the scruff of the neck and set in motion a period of innovation and expansion which continues to this day.

Beginning our discussions at the Group’s sizeable headquarters in Swanley, Julian Hall explained that before establishing the current-day business, he and his older brother, Ben, worked with their father for several years supplying items such as locks, handles, and other door and security hardware, mainly to schools and colleges. He said: “In those days we were based in a small premises in Beckenham with no production facilities. When Ben, who is now 39, left school, he joined my father, and I – being four years Ben’s junior, followed the same route on leaving school at 18. We continued working with our father – mainly supplying customers in education, and a few in acute healthcare – until 2010, when we decided to take the company in a new direction. By then we were particularly keen to develop anti-ligature products, and to broaden our product portfolio; thus, despite neither of us possessing formal design training, we set out to launch our first product, the Duralux vision panel, which has since proven highly successful in mental healthcare.”

The decision to launch the vision panel was largely a result of dissatisfaction with existing vision panels. “In many’s view,” Julian Hall explained, “the existing panels weren’t fit for purpose – being easily broken, of poor quality, and expensive to replace. Ben, who heads up the design side of the company today, thus developed the Duralux – our first product, which we launched in May 2010.”