Lesters is investing more than £2m in a 101,000 sq ft headquarters in Cannock, creating a second operating base that will separate specialist manufacturing, warehousing and administration from the company’s high-volume corrugated packaging production at Burntwood. High-volume flatbed die cutting, specialist manufacturing and distribution are due to begin at the new site in November, with office staff following around the turn of the year and ten jobs expected initially.
The move changes the way production is divided across the business rather than simply adding floor area. Burntwood will retain the high-volume manufacturing role, while Cannock takes warehousing, stores, administration and lower-volume or specialist production, giving each site a more distinct operating profile. That separation should make scheduling easier where short or unusual jobs would otherwise compete with repeat products for the same handling space, labour and supporting equipment.
Corrugated packaging plants are often constrained by movement around the converting machines as much as by the machines themselves. Board has to be stored, presented to cutting and casemaking equipment, moved through finishing stages, stacked, strapped and dispatched, so higher machine speed does little for usable throughput if material queues elsewhere. Lesters is therefore investing in a strapping line, waste extraction, a two-piece stitcher and conveyor equipment alongside the additional manufacturing space.
The conveyor is intended to reduce manual product movements, while the extraction system supports cutting operations that generate trim and waste. Neither addition is as visible as a new converting line, yet both influence how consistently the main equipment can run because operators spend less time clearing material or transferring work between stages. The new layout also gives the company more opportunity to organise specialist production separately from the sequence used for its highest-volume work.
Lesters currently employs 64 people and produces large-format corrugated cases and heavy-duty packaging for customers in third-party logistics, ecommerce, freight forwarding and automotive markets. Design, recycling and logistics sit alongside manufacturing, so growth increases the demand placed on storage and distribution as well as on the converting equipment. Moving those functions into a larger second site gives the company room to expand without forcing every activity into the existing Burntwood footprint.
A further TCY Jumbo Casemaker is being considered as the next major equipment step, although the 6 October release stops short of confirming an order. Talks with the supplier are progressing and Lesters expects the proposed machine could become operational within 18 months, making it a prospective capacity addition rather than equipment that should already be counted in the factory’s installed base.
Casemakers combine several operations required to convert corrugated board into finished cases, which makes their effective output dependent on both the machine and the flow around it. Adding another large unit before solving warehousing, material handling and downstream movement risks shifting the constraint rather than removing it; reorganising the two sites first gives Lesters a better basis for deciding how much additional converting capacity the wider operation can absorb.
The split-site model introduces its own discipline because stock, work in progress and finished goods may need to move between Cannock and Burntwood. Poor planning could turn the extra space into duplicated inventory or unnecessary transport, so production scheduling and stock control have to work across both locations as one manufacturing system. The benefit will come from using each site for work suited to its layout rather than repeatedly moving material between them to compensate for weak planning.
Managing director Billy Hutchinson has linked the expansion to a company target of reaching £30m of annual revenue by 2030, with Lesters also projecting sales growth of 25% over three years and 50% across the next decade. Those are internal ambitions rather than contracted orders, although they explain why the company is putting the operating footprint in place before committing to another major casemaking line.
November provides the first practical test, when manufacturing and distribution activity begins at Cannock while Burntwood continues carrying the high-volume workload. If the two-site structure reduces handling congestion and gives specialist jobs a clearer route through production, the later TCY decision can be judged against actual operating data rather than growth forecasts alone — a more useful measure of whether £2m has bought capacity or merely additional square footage.
