Eye on Future Of The Office
Balmoral Furniture – Ready For The Post-Covid Era
Paul Moffett (left) and Stephen Shaw, Joint Managing Directors at Balmoral Furniture.
Like most management teams here in Northern Ireland, the team at Balmoral Furniture were left staring into the abyss just over a year ago when we were all plunged into a deeply frightening lockdown. But, like most, they thought it would be for a fairly short period of time.
“I
remember going around the factory telling everyone that we were hitting the pause button, but that we’d be hitting the play button in three weeks time,” says Joint MD Stephen Shaw. “That’s what
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we were all led to believe.” It didn’t work out that way, of course. Balmoral’s head office and production facilities at Dunmurry shut down completely for nine weeks before resuming on a very limited basis at first.
“We had a small group of staff who volunteered to work to service our Health Service contracts, but that was about it at that stage,” adds Paul Moffett, the other half of the Joint MD team at the helm at Balmoral. The company, still owned by the Moffett family and run by its fourth generation, celebrated its centenary in 2020. “To say that we celebrated our centenary is a bit misleading,” smiles Paul Moffett. “We were just putting plans in place around what we’d
do to celebrate when Covid came in and put a stop to all of that.” But this is still a company with a long and proud history of manufacturing and supplying furniture to a wide range of customers. It no longer has its own retail outlets, as it once did, but it’s a leading supplier of furniture to the retail trade and on a contract basis, notably to hotels, offices, schools and colleges and to hospitals and health centres. Balmoral manufactures a range of office, school/college
