Are all our mats Made in England?
Coir Mats is owned & operated by Make An Entrance Limited, a multi-award-winning family-run UK manufacturer. We offer a very wide range of doormats in both standard and custom sizes and supply them to homes and businesses right across the UK.
We pride ourselves on our Made in England doormats, which are hand stitched the way they have been for generations. It's a skill that we are proud to keep alive, right here in our Lincolnshire workshops.
Since 2018, we have trained a new generation of mat makers in this heritage skill,
We are registered with Made in Britain.org and Make It British.co.uk. These are well-respected independent organisations that expect us to meet a high standard of integrity for our processes and labeling before they will allow us to use their logos to claim that we make products in Britain
What you want to know:
One of the questions we are sometimes asked is: Are all of your products made in England?
In a world where it's hard to know whether what you are hearing or reading is true, and some major brands put union jack logos on products that are made very far from our shores it is understandable that you would want to be sure of our claims.
In this blog post, we will explain all.
Short Answer:
The short answer is no, not everything we sell is made in the UK.
Made in England Products:
Our Made in the UK products are anything that is custom-made to order, such as our:
- Our Traditional Bespoke Hand Made Coir doormat
- Our Personalised Doormats
- Our Logo Mats
Products that we import:
- Our standard sized coir mats
- Our rubber mats
- Our raw materials for our customised products.
That might be enough for you, as the reasons for this are many and varied, so it's potentially a long answer. However, if we've piqued your interest and you'd like to understand more read on. We'll explain why not everything in our range is made in England below.
Long Answer:
Our materials
Most of our products are made from coir fibre. This incredibly sustainable material is a by-product of coconut production. In fact, the brown hairy coconuts that we recognise from the supermarket shelves have an outer casing on them when they grow on a palm tree. A sort of outer shell, a bit like the green outer casing around a horse chestnut or conker.
The inner part of this coconut husk is very fibrous. This is soaked, teased and spun into the yarn that doormats are made from.
Our climate
The UK climate does not support growing coconuts, they grow all over the world but not here in the UK. Southern India and Sri Lanka are very good at growing coconut and an entire industry is based there in growing and producing coconuts and their by-products.
We partner with factories there who make the particular grade of coir that we need. We then import huge rolls of this material to the UK in container loads by sea. It is from this material we make our smaller hand-stitched and cut-to-size doormats in our Lincolnshire workshops.
UK manufacturing
Sadly, there are currently no UK factories with the correct looms to weave the tufted woven-backed coir we need. Nor are there any UK factories producing the rolls of PVC-backed material so we select carefully chosen partners who can make the right grade of material for us.
As a result, we have to import this to the UK and from this material we make our customised products.
The same factories that make our giant rolls also make our standard-sized mats in India and Sri Lanka. What's more, the coir is the same quality, but they arrive in the UK ready-made for us in a wide range of sizes.
We make our personalised mats on custom-sized or standard-sized mats, and we make them in our Lincolnshire workshops.
Proudly we make all our logo mats here in the UK.
Our supply partners
We have supply partners in India, Sri Lanka, Italy, and The Netherlands. Our supply partners are chosen very carefully to ensure a quality product and an ethical, responsible supply chain.
We hope that this has cleared things up for you but if you have any more questions at all please don't hesitate to get in touch with our customer service team.
They are based here in our Lincolnshire offices and available Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm to answer any questions you may have.