Poundfield

A CIPA case study

Faith in the marketability of his innovative ideas and investment in worldwide patents have helped rural businessman Mark Jardine to diversify, win international business and create manufacturing jobs for former farmworkers.

From planting crops to production plant on a Suffolk farm

After almost 20 years of inventing, Mark Jardine still gets surprised at how other people will put up with poorly designed products or inefficient working practices.  His own frustration is what drives him to find a better way.  Couple that with a flair for marketing and you have a successful business that’s expanding internationally, having just signed a 12-month licensing deal with a major bulk containers company.

“I first had the idea for a better way of loading sacks of sand on to a forklift after I’d watched an operator doing it with the old type of container,” he explains.  “To position the forks correctly, he had to keep getting down from the truck and standing between it and the load while he fiddled with the sack.  Not only was it slow, laborious and inefficient, it was also potentially unsafe and against health and safety guidelines.  Nobody else thought to question what was going on, but it was obvious to me that a few simple changes could make the job easier and more efficient.”

The result of that observation was the Looplifter®, a 1-tonne capacity sack for sand and gravel that has semi-rigid loops for lift truck forks permanently built in.  Besides saving time, it makes handling the sacks by forklift very much safer.

One of Mark Jardine’s earlier designs had been for a bagging machine.  “I was pretty naïve about business then,” he laments.  “I quickly learned that in the big bag industry, if you have a good idea, everybody copies it.  Unless, of course, you protect your idea with a patent.” 

Having learned his lesson the hard way, Mark was determined to keep the copycats at bay when it came to his new design.  The local Yellow Pages led him to a firm of patent attorneys, Ipswich-based Dummett Copp.  One of the firm’s partners, Peter Gemmel, offered a free initial consultation during which he explained that it was a good idea to do a search (then, about £300) before filing a patent application.  But cash was short at the time, so Mark decided to file his patent application without doing a search.  His ‘gut instinct’ proved right and his application was granted.

“I might well have saved some money by taking shortcuts back in 1988, when I first patented Looplifter® “, Mark Jardine reflects, “but since then, protecting my designs has been my top priority. That product now has patent protection in 19 countries.  Without that protection, I’d never have raised the hundreds of thousands of pounds of backing that the business has had from private investors.  Patents have been massively important in raising investment capital.”

Mark Jardine’s private investors are about to see their patience rewarded, after a wait of eight years.  A major ‘big bag’ manufacturer has just taken a 12-month licence to use the Looplifter®  patented design and will manufacture an initial 3,000 units in India.  Mark is confident that product sales will grow rapidly and achieve market dominance.  “Margins are slim, but the UK market alone is worth £15 million.  I’m very confident that Looplifter® will be into profit within a year.”

Having firmly shifted his focus from farming to new product design, Mark Jardine soon started to come up with ideas for other products that could be manufactured on the family farm.  Shortly after Looplifter® came the Alfabloc® – a cast, reinforced concrete block in the shape of a huge letter A, some 2 metres high.  It has many advantages over the traditional L-shaped blocks used to form temporary surrounding walls for industrial-scale compost heaps and waste sorting areas, as well as storage areas for aggregates.  As with Looplifter® , one of the benefits is the ease with which the Alfabloc® can be picked up and moved by forklift truck.  The Royal Botanical gardens at Kew were sufficiently impressed with the product to order it for their giant compost heap, the size of an Olympic swimming pool.  Many others have also ordered the Alfabloc® , making it now the most widely used freestanding concrete retaining wall, in use at ports, farms, recycling sites and in many other industries.

Staying with the theme of concrete retaining structures, Mark next came up with a way of casting reinforced concrete wall faced with bricks.  “Architects often specify reinforced concrete for retaining walls, but require them to be faced with bricks for aesthetic reasons.  Doing that on-site is time-consuming and expensive, and the results can be variable.  We’ve come up with a technique for casting and facing large sections of retaining wall, up to 6 metres long, right here at Grove Farm.  We ship them out completely finished, on flat-bed trucks.  All the contractor has to do is to provide a suitable foundation and then lower them into place.”  And, of course, he’s made sure that this, like his other innovations, will have the protection of international patents.

Having diversified out of farming, Mark Jardine is now planning to diversify out of concrete.  For the time being, he is coy about the exact nature of his latest invention.  “Let’s just say that it uses plastics, not concrete, there’s a huge worldwide market for it and it will dramatically improve the efficiency of domestic waste storage and collection.”   He has clearly learned the first rule of successful patenting:  keep it to yourself until you’ve filed your patent application.

For more information, contact:

Peter Prowse: 01372 271234

Ted Blake, CIPA: 020 7405 9450