Stuga has appointed a new sales manager and sales support coordinator to support ambitious growth plans.

Ed Williams, who was appointed as commercial lead in the summer of 2022 following an acquisition by Stürtz in Germany, has now taken the reigns of the UK business as managing director and says he has made ‘significant strides’ in re-structuring the business, to meet present and future demands.

“The first piece of the puzzle was to put together a sales team capable of working together to sell both the Stuga sawing & machining centres, as well as the suite of Stürtz welding, cleaning, logistics and handling solutions,” he said.

“I am delighted to welcome to the industry Oliver Earley, our regional sales manager for the North and ROI regions, and also congratulations to Aimee Cargill who has moved into a new role to support the sales and marketing functions from the administration and technical perspective.”

Oli is said to have a broad range of experience in technical sales previously working for one of the largest packaging machinery manufacturers in the world.

“When Ed approached me, he explained the background of Stuga and their position in the industry, the growth plans – particularly the ROI & NI markets – and the machinery portfolio,” said Oli. “It was clear that Ed wanted to develop a more sophisticated and customer-focussed sales structure and I was delighted to be given the opportunity.”

Aimee Cargill, who has worked for Stuga for 10 years, commented: “Supporting the sales team will be a natural progression, and while marketing is not entirely new to me, I am looking forward to Ed’s support to help me develop and contribute in new ways.”

Stuga is also looking for a new technical manager to take full responsibility for the product introduction and service capability around the Stürtz portfolio.

Ed commented: “We have a clear plan to re-establish the Stürtz brand in the UK market and to do this we need two key ingredients: a technical structure to provide levels of maintenance and service levels to our loyal customers, and a sales structure to promote and sell the entire range.”

The company is also developing a new transom corner cleaner into the UK market, building on the success of their previous model, which will be launched at the 2023 FIT Show.

“The new transom corner cleaner will benefit from a turreting cleaning head that allows for quicker cleaning of both sides of the transom, this reducing the manual labour intervention and allowing for operators to focus more on other production activities, whilst also running the cleaning machine,” Ed explained.

Williams has also implemented significant management changes across operational and production processes, which he says will ensure the right amount of focus is given to development of strategy, objectives, processes and procedures, as well as the management of the teams.

“Getting our technical services to a level of capability on the Stürtz portfolio is going to present us a number of challenges,” he continued. “We have parts holdings to consider, training and familiarisation for engineers – many of whom haven’t worked on this type of kit before – as well as front-line technical support.

“But we have a plan and the aim is to deliver a quality of service that compares with what we can offer today on our Stuga sawing and machining centres.”