Incorporated by director and engineer Ian Boulton in February, the new company officially started trading this month as a separate entity from Boulton's other company Finishing Solutions, which he launched around 12 years ago, having been in the sector for more than 20 years.
Friction Feeder UK has developed two signature feeders, the entry-level Loco feeder and the advanced Gator feeder, both of which are now on sale, with the Loco priced initially at £3,570 and the Gator at more than double this figure dependent on configuration.
Boulton, who is the sole employee and based in Frodsham, Cheshire, will continue to operate Finishing Solutions as a separate entity, and will soon be launching a new Hot Dot applicator for sale from this business. Finishing Solutions also sells creasing and vacuum conveying machines.
“I’ve been building these feeders for 20 years so there’s plenty of experience and knowhow with them,” said Boulton.
“The more general machines take so long to build that I decided to only concentrate on the feeding bit that I always build into the products anyway. So that’s what I decided to do and this company was born.”
Boulton described the entry-level Loco feeder as having “no bells and whistles” but being particularly designed for flow-wrapping lines processing greetings cards, phone cards and envelopes. The Gator is designed specifically for feeding bigger products and is targeted at the mailing companies running Buhrs, CMC or Sitma machines.
He added: "The big advantage we've got is that because we’re quite small and flexible we can change our design to suit specific requirements. If someone says 'Can I have this?' we can do it quite quickly."
Initially, Boulton anticipates selling around one feeder a month, with the eventual aim to be around one a week. He is looking to recruit sales people soon and is in the process of working with someone looking to sell the products in the US.
“Once we’ve got a nice amount of work coming in we can look particularly for sales people. We are looking for agents round Europe for the feeders anyway, which we’ve put up on the website,” he added.
