Well 2024 is almost a wrap, and the festive season is fast approaching – but before we begin to look forward to Christmas and the new year, lets instead take a look back at the past 12 months for us at Cromwell.
Q1 – Jan – March
We started the year off with a bang, with new products, industry leading shows and even an award win, so with all this activity, where do we start?
In January, we introduced our new compostable gloves to the market – a new year, a new product within our ever-growing range. These new disposable, compostable gloves fall under our ‘Glovelee’ brand, with the name inspired by our founder James Lee. The Gloves quickly took the market by storm, and just a few weeks after their introduction, they got short-listed and won the FPA ‘Product Innovation’ awards 2024.
In March we also headed to one of the premier shows for the industry – The Manchester Cleaning Show. For 2 decades, Cromwell have proudly attended the Cleaning Show, this time it was held in the North at Manchester Central. Still on a high after the award win, the Glovelee’s were on full display at the show, alongside another new innovation of our Poly Packed too. The packing our products in polythene is a new alternative to our cardboard boxes, which are used to pack our waste liners – but with a reduced carbon impact. This was another product which certainly piqued the interest of the visitors, who often come to the show to find circular solutions and alternatives within the market. Alongside our premium waste liner solutions for waste management and recycling success, the new products, and our wonderful team proved to be a hit at the show, and it was yet another successful Cleaning Show experience.
Q2 – April – June
As we waved goodbye to winter, it was time to look forward to the new season ahead – which involved taking part in the annual GB Spring Clean. Organised by Keep Britain Tidy, the clean-up is described as ‘Britain’s largest litter pick’, and Cromwell were ever-keen to join the cause. Choosing 2 particularly highly littered areas of our local business park, our team headed out to collect any wrongfully discarded waste, and after 2 hours, 9 full sacks of rubbish were captured, and left for the local council to collect. Outside of the office, we also carried out litter picks with our sponsored youth football teams – cleaning up the littered area around their pitches. The young team, their coaches and parents joined Cromwell with litter pickers in hand, and completely transformed their playing field – now leaving a beautiful and litter free pitch, ready to continue their footballing season.
In late-June we began a bit of footballing of our own, as we formed ‘Cromwell United‘ our out of office, staff footballing challenge. Meeting the last Friday of every month, our employees came together to start what would be a mighty sporting battle, playing a 1 hour game of footy. Staff from the warehouse joined forces to create a team, to take on our office staff in what would be the first in a 3 match battle for footballing glory! Despite being an impromptu idea, mustered up by the staff in the warehouse, it proved to be an excellent way to get people from all departments across the business to get together out of hours. Whilst on the pitch new found rivalries were seemingly formed, but after the final whistle these soon turned into new friendships among the staff, who perhaps don’t see each other during working hours. It was a brilliant hour of fun, and a huge hit for all who joined, resulting in a wonderful way to get our team together.
Q3 – July – Sept
As some of our team bonded over the football, it was time to widen the net (no-pun intended) and bring the departments together even further with our first, yet soon to be annual Summer Party! We thought that celebrating a productive year needn’t wait until the cold of Christmas – instead, we decided to celebrate two times a year, introducing a Summer gathering for our team, where we toasted the hard work in the first half of 2024. The sun beamed down as the team enjoyed ice creams, stone-baked pizzas, games, quizzes and plenty of staff bonding. It was great to bring joy to the faces of the team, and a well deserved celebration after a great 6 months of hard work.
Q4 – Sept – Dec
September calls and event season 2.0 begins! As well as our regular showcase at the LARAC Conference, where we got to catch up with our Local Authority customers, showcasing our latest innovations, we also attended 2 brand new shows, ideal for the promotion of our award winning Glovelee Compostable Gloves. Running side by side at London’s ExCeL, we proudly exhibited at the Restaurant and Takeaway Innovation Show and the Garden Centre Expo. After studying the audience and fellow exhibitors, we saw this to be a great opportunity to take our compostable products, both gloves and sacks – to showcase organic disposable and handling. Also at the restaurant show, we were able to give visitors a sneak peak of our brand new piping bags, which will debut in 2025. All shows saw great interest in our new and existing products, including LARAC which also gave us the opportunity to promote our CHSA waste sacks to the audience of council customers. With a final few customer shows such as Nationwide, our event season for 2024 came to a successful end – with Bagman, Cromwell’s favourite waste management mascot making his triumphant return!
September also saw our first annual Sherburn Business’s Litter Pick, where we invited local businesses, community groups and schools to join us for a 1 hour clean-up. Despite only being cleaned during the GB Spring Clean in April, the litter levels have grown once again around the Sherburn Industrial Estate, luckily this time, we had a team of 35 people to tackle it! An astonishing 42 bags of waste were collected and thus removed from the streets, which included a child’s bike. The council later collected these, taking them for recycling and correct waste segregation. The clean up was a huge success, and plans for it’s return next year are already in the works.
As well as an array of charity fund raising throughout the year too, we ended December on a high, with our annual Christmas Party which was enjoyed by all who attended, it was a great way to celebrate all the successes that were made over the past 12 months, whilst also looking forward to the exciting opportunities which 2025 holds.
Looking forward
With just 1 working week left of the year, we want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support this year – and we look forward to working with you in 2025, and beyond! Happy Holidays from all the Cromwell team, here’s to an equally as productive new year!