Helping customers unlock fastener potential for 40 years

EJOT UK has grown from a home-based start-up in 1985 into one of the country’s leading fastening systems manufacturers, servicing customers from a state-of-the-art manufacturing, logistics and research and development centre in Yorkshire.

The journey of the business started with the EJOT Group’s ambition to develop a UK business that it believed would offer customers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland the best of both worlds – a portfolio of technically-advanced products and services centred around their needs, backed by the strength of an international market leader.

That ambition has been realised over four decades now, with EJOT UK firmly established as a designer and manufacturer of fasteners for a wide variety of construction and industrial applications, ranging from roofing and cladding to automotive manufacturing.

The story of EJOT UK began with the formation of a joint-venture in Scotland. The partnership between EJOT Group and a Scottish company called EcoMetal resulted in the formation of a new enterprise registered as EJOT EcoFast in Glasgow on 25th July 1985. However, after initially serving the market ‘working from home’, the location chosen for the company’s first true premises was a factory unit more than 200 miles south in Leeds.

 

Building a home in Yorkshire

EJOT EcoFast’s site at Kirkstall became known as ‘F1’, after the factory unit that the company originally occupied, and it was eventually expanded into further units to occupy 500 sq. m of production and storage space. It was a facility purely dedicated to fasteners for building and construction, and where Colorfast, EJOT’s market-leading over-moulded roofing and cladding self-drilling fastener, was developed and manufactured for the first time.

In 1996, EJOT EcoFast had outgrown its F1 site and moved across Leeds to Hunslet, where it found a new home in a 1600 sq. m building that would serve the company until 2003. During this period, the name EcoFast was changed to EJOT UK Ltd and now under the stewardship of Dirk Homrighausen, the business moved forward rapidly to take shape as the subsidiary it is today.

As the world moved into a new millennium, so EJOT UK’s product portfolio expanded to include industrial ranges. This included the Delta PT screw which was, at that time, continuing to pioneer plastics assembly in the same way that EJOT’s original PT screw had revolutionised manufacturing processes globally in the 1970s. Its capabilities were attracting the attention of the UK’s automotive manufacturing sector and, in 2002, EJOT UK secured its first supply agreement with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), a customer it continues to work with today.

By 2003, the company had outgrown its Hunslet base and 24km away, work began on what is EJOT UK’s present home at Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire. This purpose-built development was designed to be much more than a modern logistics centre, with the goal to create a building to accommodate engineering, manufacturing and customer service offices on one level, with administration space on the floor above.

 

Constantly pushing the boundaries

One thing that remained consistent in the EJOT UK business despite the changing premises was a long-term strategy to ensure EJOT UK would be a leader in the research, development and testing of new fastening products. This took on a whole new dimension in 2008, when new MD Chris Middleton embarked on a plan to dramatically upgrade the company’s testing laboratory in line with EJOT Group’s original facilities and brand – EJOT Applitec.

This quickly enabled EJOT UK to offer an extension to its support for construction OEMs and system designers and it accelerated the advent of its own R&D team. One of the first products to emerge from the Applitec Centre was EJOT Opticore, a product specifically designed for the installation of membrane-faced composite roofing panels. Its innovative dual self-coring and drilling advantage quickly made it a ‘go-to’ roofing solution.

But it was not only construction fasteners where EJOT UK was making some major technical advances. In 2016, the UK industrial team, supported by colleagues in Germany, demonstrated EJOWELD at the UK Automechanika exhibition, a key moment in broadening the application scope for this unique friction-weld technology. Since that time, this fastening system for joining ultra-light alloys to super-strength boron steel has been installed extensively at JLR and is now deployed on several of the manufacturer’s key models.

 

Creating a platform for the next era

EJOT UK’s current managing director, Robert Hardstaff, took the helm in 2018, and he has overseen the most significant development of the business to date. Supported by the senior management team in the UK as well as within EJOT Group in Germany, Robert has brought to fruition the company’s long-term goal of creating world-class facilities that have not only strengthened EJOT’s competitive advantage in Great Britain and Ireland but also enabled it to serve a growing customer base in overseas markets.

When the company moved to its current site in 2003, EJOT Group decided to purchase development land adjacent to the newly built complex. This proved to be a forward-thinking and strategic moment in EJOT UK’s continued development, paving the way for the most recent and most significant site expansion.

Following approval by EJOT Group with agreed funding, during 2020-2021, when the world was enduring the global pandemic, a second adjoining building was constructed to extend its manufacturing and logistics operation by 4,500 sq. m. This has provided vastly increased operating space, and it accommodates the state-of-the-art Applitec Centre that is much larger and more comprehensively equipped than what came before, and is integral to its service and support to customers in both the construction and industrial sectors.