20/08/2009
Truly Remarkable as featured in the Promota Bulletin
Bulletin editor Mark Whitehouse talks to Edward Douglas Miller, who heads up an award-winning company which – in just a few short years - has blazed an eco trail whilst developing a business model of which he is fiercely proud.
Edward Douglas Miller is a man on a mission. By turns passionate and engaging, he is the brains and energy behind a Worcester-based company which is – in every sense – Remarkable.
Remarkable – the company which Edward has been running for around 15 years – is housed in stunning premises near the centre of Worcester. The company has been blazing an eco trail since its inception and its home very much reflects its values. Edward and his 30-strong team have taken a former railway servicing yard and put an enormous amount of effort into cleaning the brickwork, refurbishing and developing the building so that today it houses the Remarkable factory. All ornate brickwork, sweeping archways and space a-plenty wherever you look, it suits Edward’s company down to the ground (and below ground too if you include their extensive storage area). At its simplest, Remarkable is a recycling company, using the sorts of materials millions of us discard every day and
manufactures them to sell to consumer and corporate markets.
Edward will willingly and lovingly talk enthusiastically about the machines he has helped invent as he takes visitors around the hugely impressive premises. It’s difficult to pigeon-hole him – businessman, inventor, entrepreneur, scientist – but he’s in no doubt about what his company fundamentally stands for.
He started the business in the mid-1990s, operating out of a London bedsit. “Recycling was just not seen as an exciting concept back then,” he says. “We were bringing out emotively driven products as a start-up business. Our earliest products were designed to tug on the emotional heartstrings and create interest in recycling.” The first product was the Remarkable pencil, which took plastic cups and turned them into pencils. Put like that, it
sounds simple, but Edward’s role was complicated and vital. He came from a scientific background, working with Sony, and understood how to re-engineer polymers through the
process which converted plastic cups into the graphite core and “wood” of the pencils. He was also instrumental in developing much of the machinery which would enable Remarkable to do this. The pencil is still the company’s flagship product today – iconic in the promotional field – and its success has given Edward immense satisfaction.
“The pencil, made from a plastic cup, came out of an office environment and would go back into an office environment. But that process brought so many more messages with it; people learned to write and communicate with it, the products were being sent to Africa to teach people in schools – all with a direct link to people throwing away plastic cups in offices.”
It was the beginning of a journey which today sees Remarkable manufacture almost five million pencils each year.
The company quickly gained recognition and plaudits in the late 1990s as it picked up ground in the marketplace. A host of awards were forthcoming – Recycled Product of the
Year, Environmental Product of the Year, and Inventor of the Year amongst them.
In 1999 the pencil became a “Millennium product” – which meant in effect that the whole business was taken to be an exhibit in the Millennium Dome. “Tony Blair used Remarkable as an example of British industry when he opened the Dome,” says Ed. The company made 3.75 million pencils in the Dome and quickly grew from a small operation to an exhibitor with more than six million visitors. Edward sees this period as the real “launchpad” for all that Remarkable stands for. “The money we made from the Dome experience really catapulted us to expand our offering and lines, to improve manufacturing processes, the tooling, and printing kit, as well as enabling us to develop a colourful retail range. The sheer exposure of being able to talk to people about recycling was exhilarating. “It was obvious that people were concerned about the environment, and they could see us using materials again and how that lessens your impact on the environment.
“There is an accessibility to our products. We can be a vehicle of interaction for people who want to effect change – an access point for them to do that, because often people have fears and want to make a difference but don’t know what to do.”
A period at a new factory in London was followed by the move to the 35,000 sq ft Worcester premises in 2004. The company had grown and evolved, particularly in the fields of retail and office products, as well as the education market.
That expansion means the company now has a range of production lines and processes in place, enabling them to recycle a wide range of products. And none of them is anything less than innovative; for example using tyre dust to produce rubber covers for stationery products.
The move to Worcester was also a logical one, as a lot of Remarkable’s recycled materials come from Birmingham, and Edward wanted to be as close as he could to those sources.
“We have never been about buying stuff in from China and flogging it; I don’t believe in it. It is not what our core values are about – we communicate environmental issues in the best
possible way and we get a lot of brand loyalty from that because people enjoy what we do.”
Edward is always looking for opportunities to help other businesses tackle environmental
issues.
“We can be a solution to a recycling problem. If companies have a waste stream they want to recycle we can actually turn that into a product and get them to use their own waste to
promote themselves,” he says.
A classic example of that was Remarkable helping Sony recycle PlayStation 2s into pens promoting Sony.
“To continue to do such work, it’s important we have an excellent standard of people. Ultimately, I’m there to help the team progress and the business to progress, but along the way I like to encourage people to think about what they’re doing and work out how what they do affects them and those around them.”
In a world of increasing environmental concern, Remarkable is all about providing choice and sparking thought and debate. Through that approach, it challenges people to think
about the world around them and how they go about their business. To do so as a successful ongoing concern and to cut across so many sectors is testimony to how far the company has come in such a short time.
Now that truly is Remarkable.
Back to News Archive