A New Start

It is seldom that a manufacturing company gets a new start in its life.

We have been established at Willow since 1887, spanning into the third century. The original partnership of the Wilson Brothers was later incorporated in 1915 and then became Willow Ware Australia Pty Ltd.

During our life span we have seen and weathered and survived the rhythms of boom and busts, of inflations and depressions, of World Wars and the massive changes in technologies and social expectations.

And like the Willow tree, we have bent with these but not broken. We have learned to turn our difficulties into victories and to conserve the victories that we do have, into the reserves that underwrite our future.

Living through change at Willow has been achieved by a willingness to change the nature of our manufactured product in tune with the change of our market and the needs of the consumer, coupled with the avoidance of competitors’ death blows in the form of monopolies from within Australia and imports being sold here below our cost of production.

But all this is not enough. To survive we must always be the best in whatever we choose to do.

We must be the best in manufacturing technology, in warehousing, in data processing, in financial management, marketing and in selling.

Without excellence in all these things we are not competitive and would therefore be viewed by our financiers (and proprietors) as unworthy of further financial risk.

So the time has come to go back to a single site of operations – not done since 1930 – to join up our factory, office and distribution centre as one smooth operation in order for us to be competitive in the next generation.

That is why we are at Tullamarine in a new plant that is state of the art in all these disciplines.
A fundamental in business is the management and reduction of risk.

• Risk to our buildings and plant (Property insurance)

• Risk against product (new product development)

• And most importantly, risk to our own people who run our business (safety)

The new building is designed to reduce tangible risks to the absolute minimum and will demand a new culture of all of us. It is vital to our own personal well-being and to the health of the Company to leave the old culture with the “museum” at North Melbourne.

We welcome the opportunity for a new start at Tullamarine in an environment described already by some as “worker friendly”

Ralph Wilson Snr
Chairman.