Flintshire furniture manufacturer to make hundreds of thousands of gowns for healthcare heroes on COVID-19 frontline

A Flintshire based furniture manufacturer is joining the fight against coronavirus by producing personal protective equipment for Wales’ healthcare heroes.

Workers at Westbridge Furniture Design who are more used to making sofa’s for the likes of Marks & Spencer, John Lewis and Next, will begin making hundreds of thousands of gowns for the NHS from Monday.

Greenfield based Westbridge – which has production sites at Deeside Industrial Estate – will supply 75,000 gowns per week for an initial 14-week period.

Paul Myerscough, Operations Director at Westbridge, said: “From Monday 4th May we will start gearing up for production, starting at 6,000 gowns per day and if we can get enough material, we can easily ramp this up to 15,000 gowns a day.”

“We are delighted to be able to use our skilled workforce towards the national collective effort to provide much needed kit for health workers on the front line.

We will, of course, look to do more in the coming days and weeks.”

Westbridge, one of the UK’s largest upholstery manufacturers, has signed up to start making PPE for the NHS, and aim to supply up to 75,000 gowns per week from next Monday (4th May).

It’s great to see a skilled workforce coming together to help in the fight against #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/MKJ8h7sBIU

— BFM (@BFM_LTD) May 1, 2020

Three small Welsh manufacturing businesses are also joining the COVID-19 fight by producing scrubs for healthcare workers.

A firm which specialises in the production of flags for films, TV, festivals, and castles among other uses, and two independent seamstresses, from Swansea and Carmarthen, will all be making vital supplies to support the NHS in Wales.

Work is underway at Red Dragon Flagmakers, which has already received fabric, while seamstresses Tesni Owen and Bethan Jones Boutique are set to start producing scrubs this week.

Welsh Government-linked them with Alexandra, a UK-based company that supplies the NHS with scrubs but is heavily reliant on overseas markets for both material and production, after securing a large amount of fabric from within the UK market when it was notified the Far East and sub-continent would be partially closing down production due to coronavirus.

It also managed the logistics of delivering fabric from Alexandra to the three companies to speed up the production process and support the supply chain.

Together the three businesses will produce 1,000 scrubs per week.