ImagesMagUK_May_2021

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 34 images MAY 2021 A fter 33 years’ service in the Royal Navy, Paul Griffiths knows the ropes – literally – when it comes to seamanship. He channels this expertise into his business, BS Embroidery Plus, which specialises in decorated garments for the armed services alongside other printing and embroidery. Now with his three children and other new recruits on board, the business is going full steam ahead with extra Melco embroidery machines and other ambitious plans for growth. “We’ve got a lot in the pipeline,” Paul says. “All I can see is us going one way without a doubt.” The “BS” harks back to the company’s original name, Bosuns Store, set up by Paul – a Royal Navy chief bosun’s mate – in 1992 in Torpoint in Cornwall to sell nautically themed products, alongside Teddy Bear Workshop run by his late wife, Chris. “People don’t know what the BS stands for but nobody forgets the name,” Paul jokes. With just a Toyota Cassette single-needle machine (taking designs off actual cassettes), they ended up specialising in supplying sailor teddy bears, mainly to HMS Raleigh, the navy’s shore training establishment near Torpoint, until cheaper imported plush pushed them to focus on T-shirts, baseball caps and other garments using sublimation and heat transfer. Business really took off in 1998 with a major contract to supply T-shirts and Sails talk BS Embroidery Plus has chartered a course through the choppy waters of the past year by focusing on armed forces merchandise, biker apparel and new, innovative sales ideas softshell jackets and baseball caps are embroidered or printed with designs such as ships’ crests and regimental badges, sold online or at bases including HMS Raleigh, HMS Collingwood in Hampshire and BRNC Dartmouth in Devon. For HMS Raleigh each week, it creates ‘passing-out’ T-shirts – like leavers’ hoodies for sailors – listing the whole class with the divisional crest. What sets BS Embroidery Plus apart from competitors is that, in exchange for a fee, it is fully licensed by the armed forces who vet samples for quality. For every military item sold, 10% goes to armed forces charities such as the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust. Ecommerce and Hells Angels Alongside two distributors in Portsmouth and Dartmouth, BS Embroidery Plus operates its own shop in Plymouth city centre, run by Paul’s daughter, Rachael. This was shut for a year due to the pandemic, but opened again in April. Merchandise is also sold via Ebay and Facebook, which sees items shipped all over the world, and BS Embroidery Plus has also been developing a new online ecommerce solution with DecoNetwork. Due to go live by May, the site will host up to 500 self-contained ‘shops’, mostly for individual military establishments, ships and regiments, each accessible rugby shirts for the Royal Navy and Royal Marines as incentives on the armed forces’ recruitment roadshows. Two years later, Paul was able to quit the navy to devote himself full-time to the company, which relocated from a small shop in Looe to 1,000 square feet in Liskeard. With print services expanding to include dye sublimation, vinyls and transfers, it took its current name. “We put ‘plus’ on because it was plus everything else we wanted to do,” Paul explains. The business diversified further after the recession in 2007 when the armed services no longer needed to actively recruit via roadshows. “My orders from the Royal Navy went to zero overnight. What the military taught me was to adapt and overcome, and we changed our model to B2B. We bought new machines and almost started again.” Now with DTG added to the list of services, BS Embroidery Plus has become a leading supplier of decorated garments, bags and other military merchandise for the Royal Navy as well as the Royal Marines, the British Army, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and the Royal Air Force – about 55% of its work. Items such as polo shirts, hoodies, fleeces, Paul Griffiths Digital embroidery design The BS Embroidery Plus team outside the factory in Liskeard A baseball cap embroidered with the Royal Regiment of Artillery emblem