F urthermore, the business is in the middle of a £5 million expansion plan at both its British and Czech Republic sites, together with expanding its presence in the American, Asian and European markets with active sales and support operations across the globe. Pickering Electronics was founded by the late John Moore in 1968. The electrical engineering business was initially based in Colchester and made clip-on parking lights which could attach to a driver’s car window. From this, John started experimenting with reed relays, or electrical switches, developing high performance switching products in miniature. By 1983, John and his team had developed an innovative way of winding the ‘formerless’ operating coils, based on a system used to operate electronic watches. This new technique heralded a new era of reed relay design, which enabled Pickering to triple the manufacturing area within their factory in Clacton after only three years of opening in 1980.
Pickering Interfaces started in 1988, as a sister company to the original relay manufacturing business after they saw a need to set up a switching systems arm of the business, separate from the highly successful relay manufacturing operation. Led by John Moore’s son Keith, it soon acquired a reputation as a leader in developing state-of-the-art electronic switching systems, which used the reed relay units from Pickering Electronics. Today Keith runs the group which continues to design and manufacture reed relays and complex switching and simulation modules. These products are used in various industries including aerospace, automotive, defence, science and other advanced technological testing equipment applications. The relay modules are highly specialist designs, each one made with many small
The customer base for Pickering Interfaces’ products is impressive, including most of the large automotive manufacturers, the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN near Geneva and a number of defence industry organisations across the globe which have all made use of Pickering’s highly specialised electrical engineering skills. Keith Moore credits the success of the business to a strategy of steady growth, minimising risk wherever possible. “When my dad started Pickering Electronics over fifty years ago, things were often financially perilous. Our family
home was at risk, and it was eight years until he started to make a profit. Over the years, we have taken a cautious approach, seeing the business grow in incremental steps, and investing through retained profits. It means that where necessary we can absorb mistakes, and we can control our growth by expanding our operations into adjacent marketplaces, and
variations, depending on the application. This capability to create bespoke products means that they can be manufactured in high or low volumes, across a wide variety of applications.
ensuring we are never wholly reliant on one region.”
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