Sheffield Star

A South Yorkshire firm which has developed an export market spanning 54 countries in just five years has won a prestigious Queen’s Award.
History and Heraldry, which produces a range of gift products sold at tourist attractions, is the only company in the county to achieve the accolade.
Last year three firms were presented with the award.
The firm, better known as H&H, was launched in the early 1990s in Rotherham by Malcom Ogg and Dianne Clothier as a genealogy franchise, selling framed posters detailing the origins of family names through department stores.
But it developed quickly after expanding into the design and marketing of a wider range of impulse purchase products, small and comparatively cheap gifts such as key rings and photo frames, combining sentiment and humour.
Major tourist attractions across the UK, including castles, stately homes and cathedrals are now among H&H’s leading customers. But the firm was joined by export director Gerard Lakmaker less than five years ago, opening up new markets in 54 countries across the globe.
That success has resulted in a Queen’s Award for International Trade.
The firm has a workforce of 70 and is based at the Hellaby Industrial Estate. Its overseas sales has grown by 150 per cent in the last three years.
Customers from abroad now account for sales worth £6.4 million and it is expected the export market will soon take up 70 per cent of production.
Markets are as diverse as North and South America, the Middle and the Far East and Australasia as well as Europe, where one of H&H’s most successful markets is Finland.
“Finland has a population of five million and 20 per cent of the country is water, so a lot of manufacturers ignore the market, but we reckon one in every four people has one of our products there,” says Mr Lakmaker.
H&H reckons it exported around 22 million individual items last year but has no plans to rest on its laurels.
The Company has just appointed a distributor in the Ukraine, Mr Lakmaker has just returned from a sales visit to Mexico and he is off to Latvia next week.
Developing foreign markets is no easy task for a company specialising in impulse purchases, he stresses.
H&H’s Queen’s Award comes three years after the company was named New Exporter of the Year and only a few months after the firm was named one of Britain’s 100 fastest growing companies.

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