From Brown Pestell to Brown GearTech: Fifty Years On

Fifty Years On: Who We Are and Where We’re Headed

Brown GearTech has been operating for 50 years, manufacturing gearbox and motor systems. The company began as Brown Pestell and was founded by John Brown as a family owned, independent business. Many things have changed since then, including the name, the technology and the scale. But what hasn’t changed is the products and the ownership structure. We still produce gearboxes and motor systems. We’re still family owned and we’re still independent. This is more significant than you may think, as it means the decisions we make are not made by a distant shareholder. Instead, they are made by people who have been in this business for decades, and plan to be involved in it for decades to come.

What We Actually Offer

At Brown GearTech, we design, build and test our products ourselves, under one roof in the UK. We provide a different approach to buying off the shelf as we build specifically to the application, considering the different factors that could affect the product. This includes the load, environment, duty cycle and what the product is actually going to be used for, so we can build specifically to match that piece of equipment. This approach exists due to where our products mainly get used.

 Most of what we create end up in mission critical applications, meaning situations where a gearbox or motor system means a production line stops, infrastructure goes offline, someone having to explain why something that was meant to keep running, didn’t. We design with that scenario in mind, instead of making it an afterthought, ensuring all our products are equipped for any scenario and keep running.

We don’t compete on price, and we’re upfront about that factor. Instead, we’ve built our business around being reliable when failure isn’t an option. That means when something needs attention of any kind, including a warranty query or a spec that may need revisiting, we take responsibility for that rather than deflecting, as our customers put their reputation on our shoulders when they purchase a product from us.

The Industries We Work Alongside

Reliability means something different depending on what it is you are running. We work across a broad variety of sectors including food processing, logistics and refrigerated transport, recycling and waste management, water and environmental systems, and other heavy-duty manufacturing. These are industries where unplanned downtime is critical and needs to be avoided. Working across this many sectors means that we’ve seen many different types of failures and many ways equipment gets pushed to its limits. This experience feeds back into how we move on to design new spec systems for our customers, and customers in sectors we’ve never worked in before.

Growing in Kent

Over the past few months, we’ve doubled our staff. Which is not a small statement for a company of our size. This is happening because of demand from existing customers and new partners across the sectors we work in. The range of people we’ve brought on work in our manufacturing base in Kent, where our company has operated for a long time and where we are intending to keep growing, with our sales team travelling across the country to work with customers.

More people provide us with more capacity to design, build and test to the standard we are aiming to hold ourselves to. In addition, it also means we can be consistent with lead times, which matter as much to the customer as they do to us and the quality of the product itself. Growth for us isn’t about announcing ambition. It’s about genuinely being able to follow through on what we say we can and will deliver, whilst having the people in place to do that.

Fifty Years, Still Going

It’s worth considering the fifty years behind us, because it’s easy to move past. Fifty years means the company has operated through a number of situations and challenges, including several shifts in manufacturing technology and changing customer expectations. However, throughout all of that, we have adapted and focused on continuing to do the engineering properly. That is still our approach today. We’re trying to be the company that OEMs and industries can rely on when the application cannot afford to fail.

One Way We Can Help

If any of this sounds relevant to something you happen to be working on, get in touch with us. Got a gearbox spec you’re not entirely sure on? Send it over and we’ll have a look. No obligation or sales pitch, just a second opinion from people who have spent a long time within this business. Sometimes that’s all it takes to catch something before it has the chance to become something more expensive and impactful further down the line. Let us help by contacting us at https://browngeartech.com/contact/