Staff striving to raise funds to save historic company

PART of a historic, family-owned optical firm in Gloucester is crowdfunding to avoid imminent collapse.

Staff from Norville Optical, which entered administration on July 3, are racing against the clock to raise £850,000 in funds from the Gloucestershire community.

The company is owned by The Norville Group. Norville Optical covers their laboratories and Gloucester factory. Retail division Norville Opticians’ has nine branches across the South West which have been sold.

The Norville Optical factory has operated for more than 110 years and 150 members of staff fear that they will lose their jobs if they don’t secure enough support from the community before a meeting with administrators in the coming days.

Alastair Chambers, 39, the man behind the Go Fund Me campaign, said: “The administrators are either going to divvy it up into lots of different parts and sell off the machines, or someone else will come in and buy the name of the business and the machinery but move it to Birmingham. Then just sell what they can.”

At the time of publication, the Go Fund Me page had raised £3,000 towards the target. The Norville Group has been supplying optical products for approximately 60 years.

Divvy it up into lots of

different parts and sell off the machines