Factory workers With stars in their eyes
Contact lens makers celebrate their loyal and
It’s not uncommon for a disgruntled factory worker to utter to their offspring the doomsday mantra: “Stick in at school or you’ll end up working in a place like this.”
It’s not like that at daysoft – the Scottish manufacturing enterprise whose founding father invented the affordable daily disposable contact lens.
Since production began in 2001 at the 30,000 sq ft plant on Hamilton Business Park in Blantyre, Lanarkshire, around 300 people have, at some point, been employed by daysoft.
And scores of these employees are husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mums and daughters, siblings and cousins.
It’s a source of great pride to executive chairman Dr Ron Hamilton, his wife and company director Moya, and managing director Alan Ralph that the 200 people who work at daysoft enjoy their jobs enough to actively encourage their loved ones to follow them through the factory doors into rewarding careers with real prospects.
Take husband and wife Tony and Lorraine Whyte, who have notched up 40 years’ service at daysoft between them.
There were only 13 employees on the payroll when Alan, who has held senior roles at international level, was lured from a lucrative position in the Republic of Ireland to what was a near-empty factory in Blantyre.
On meeting Ron Hamilton, the visionary who was to revolutionise the contact lens market, Alan found the entrepreneur’s passion for his product, and the people who were to produce it, infectious.
Sensing this was an opportunity to become, at its inception, part of something very special, Alan uprooted with his family from the
Emerald Isle to join a company that is now among the region’s biggest private sector employers.
Not far behind him in signing a contract with daysoft was production manager of 22 years, John Brown.
“It’s common for the people who work here to have 20 years’ service,” explained John.
“And 15 years’ service is very common.”
But it’s not a case of workers remaining because they have nowhere else to go.
Daysoft, insists MD Alan, has earned the loyalty of its workforce through the inclusive, stable working environment the company has created.
And also key to staff attainment and morale, says Alan, is his own visibility on the shop floor, on which he greets each worker by their first name.
“It is absolutely crucial that leaders in the company are front-of-centre and never tell a lie,” he said.
“It is first name terms in here. No questions are out of bounds. Ideas are always encouraged. Maybe 99 per cent of them will crash and burn, but everybody gets the chance to see their idea taken forward.
“If Evelyn the cleaner does not come to work, the company will stop functioning. She’s just as important as me.
“Nobody is going to walk out of here a millionaire on their wages. But what people get here is opportunity.
“They’re going into customer care, into IT, they’re becoming supervisors, production managers.”
Staff at daysoft may be producing 300,000 contact lenses a day – up to 1.3 million a week.
But that considerable volume has introduced no sense of drudgery within this manufacturing hive, where much of the multimillion pound technology has been designed by the pool of talented engineers who sit in a room above the purring machinery that was their brainchild.
The story of Steven Corrigan’s rise through the ranks is typical of that of a long-serving daysoft employee.
After starting on the bottom rung of the ladder in 2002, he was promoted to team leader and is now fulfilment manager.
“Once you are in it, you are in with the bricks. It’s always had that feel about it,” said Steven, 50, whose son, Jay, became the first baby to be born to a daysoft worker 21 years ago.
Under the auspices of Steven and his team, orders are posted daily to customers in more than 100 countries all over the world.
By way of illustration, he delves into a giant mail bag, pulling out flat, hand-assembled packs containing daily disposable lenses destined for far-flung countries including Israel, Canada, the Caribbean, China and Japan.
Some go to British Forces overseas, and some wing their way to the Vatican City.
Regardless of their destination, all orders have one thing in common: from receipt of order, to manufacturing, to packaging and dispatching, every stage of the process is handled with precision by daysoft.
There is no intermediary, no middle man to force up costs – and no other business in the industry can stake that claim.
That’s why the company estimates it has saved customers who switched from other suppliers more than £200million.
At every level of the business, it’s abundantly clear that founding chairman Ron and his wife, Moya – who created the only business in the highly-regulated medical devices industry in which manufacturing and supply functions are performed under one roof – are held in high regard.
The fact that daysoft has no HR department can be traced back to Ron’s days as a 17-year-old student apprentice at the Hoover plant in Cambuslang.
Then, if you had a grievance, you took it to your foreman – and not to “someone in an office down the corridor”.
As an apprentice, Ron’s time was split between practical manufacturing and product design training, and academic learning at the institution that is now the University of Strathclyde.
Both former pupils of Uddingston Grammar School, childhood sweethearts Ron and Moya – a student teacher – were married in 1963. Emigrating
to Canada four years later, Ron took a job with Kimberly Clark, which pioneered the boxed tissues cube.
Following the birth of their son, Andrew, the couple returned to the UK where Ron found himself running the domestic appliance division of Thorn EMI.
When his pitch for investment in a new piece of machinery was rejected by the divisional board of directors in favour of pumping $35million into 1981 American-British comedy film, Honey Tonk Freeway, he sensed it was time to move on.
The movie flopped spectacularly, becoming one of the most expensive box office bombs in history, losing backers Thorn EMI between $11m and $22m dollars.
Next to grace his CV was California-based CooperVision – a global giant that was making healthy profits through the production of contact lens cleaning solutions.
It sparked an idea in Ron, who was by now ready to take control of his own destiny.
He and Moya bought a home in Southampton with an adjoining double garage – a 650 sq ft space that was to become his modest laboratory.
It was from these humble beginnings that Ron, around the time of his 50th birthday, began making contact lenses, with Moya’s pressure cooker acting as steriliser.
When he was awarded a £15,000 Smart start-up award, the industry sat up and took notice.
An article in The Optician magazine was followed by a call from BBC World Service.
Now with the accolade of an endorsement for his product from the University of Manchester, Boots Opticians began to sniff around.
At a time when a single soft contact lens cost £54, and wearers shelled out more than £100 a year in cleaning solution, Ron was confident that his daily disposable lens could retail at just 50p.
“People did not know whether to believe you or have you certified,” he said. “For many, it seemed too good to be true.”
With interest from Boots Opticians piquing, its senior management in 1988 requested a meeting at Ron and Moya’s home to see the process in operation.
“We met them in a room in the back garden and gave them a demo,” remembers Ron.
His modest presentation impressed, with the Boots Opticians delegation expressing an interest on the premise that both quality and cost meet expectation.
A commercial endorsement soon followed.
In his quest for funding, Ron gave a “very much hand-knitted” presentation to Scottish Enterprise (SE), with his concept “cutting mustard” with the Scottish
Government.
Eventually, a funding package of £750,000 was in place, with gap funding provided by British Coal, Lothian & Edinburgh Enterprise, and SE.
By 1990, a production line was operating from premises in Livingston and the Bootsbranded one-day lenses were selling “like hot cakes”.
The venture, which was a huge success, went on to be sold to a global eye care giant in a multi-million pound deal.
Fast forward to 1998, when SE invited the Hamiltons to join a group of business people on a fact-finding mission to the USA to acquaint themselves with a phenomenon known as ‘the internet.’
“We could see this thing was going to take off,” said Ron, whose premises on Hamilton Business Park were then under construction.
And so the daysoft model was born. Now with 100,000
people worldwide wearing daysoft contact lenses daily, at a cost of just 20p a lens, the company – the only one in the world that manufactures lenses and sells directly to customers – now competes with US giants including Johnson & Johnson, CooperVision and Bausch & Lomb.
With the couple now in their early 80s, Ron swears he doesn’t think about work beyond the four hours a week he now spends in the office – a claim to which Moya responds with a playful scoff.
Resolutely committed to continuing to grow the daysoft operation, the gentleman of manufacturing in Lanarkshire said: “We have to be realistic.
“That is a situation Alan, Moya and I are thinking about on a daily basis. “
He added: “It’s something we have to do, for the interests of the people who work here and have built this business.”