Established 1981 · Addingham, West Yorkshire
By Jan Garth, Managing Director
This year marks a significant milestone for us: 45 years in business. What started as a one-man venture in a Yorkshire Dales kitchen has grown into a trusted global supplier of precision plastic and rubber balls, and it’s still a family business today.
A Phone Call That Started It All
Our story begins in 1981, when my father, Raymond Summers, received a phone call from a colleague in America. The proposal: set up a UK sister company to a plastic ball supplier in the US. The answer was yes, and The Precision Plastic Ball Company Ltd was born.
It all started small. Literally at home. The Summers family kitchen in Addingham, a village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, became the company’s first premises, with the whole family pitching in. As orders grew, so did the business’s footprint through the house, spreading from the kitchen into the garage and then the spare bedroom.
Outgrowing the Family Home
By the mid-1990s, it was clear the balls had taken over the house. In 1996, we moved into our first proper commercial premises: 70 Main Street, Addingham, a converted antique shop that became (and remains) our office and storage. It’s hard to picture, but this modest, terraced building holds a stock of over 13 million balls.
From Valves to Christmas Baubles
Our earliest customers came from engineering, supplying balls for valves, pumps and level indicators. But demand didn’t stay in one lane for long. Over four and a half decades, our balls have found their way into an unusually wide range of applications: agricultural, automotive and marine components, art installations and sculptures, props for film, theatre and television productions, and, more recently, decorative baubles that customers hang on their Christmas trees each year.
Today we stock balls in over 20 different materials, hollow and solid, in hundreds of colours, some manufactured to tolerances as fine as ±0.002″ (±0.05mm).
Still a Family Business
Four and a half decades on, we’re still family-run. I’ve carried the business forward, continuing the hands-on, personal approach my father built the company on back in 1981.
I am supported by my son, Oliver and daughter, Gina.
The Real Measure of 45 Years: The Customers Who Stayed
Ask me what I’m proudest of, and it isn’t the millions of balls we’ve shipped or the 20-plus materials on our shelves. It’s the customers who have stuck with us since the very beginning, relationships now well into their fourth decade, built on the same responsiveness and straight-talking service we started with.
That loyalty, alongside the support of our customers, suppliers and partners old and new, is what’s got us to 45 years.
Here’s to the Next Chapter
From the kitchen in Addingham to a global supply chain, our story is a reminder of what a small family business can build with the right combination of graft, relationships, and, apparently, a well-timed phone call.
Established 1981 – 45 years – Still Rolling
Jan Garth, Managing Director
