Bath-headquartered eyewear firm Inspecs has been named as the South West’s fastest-growing company in a new financial league table.
The firm, which designs and makes a wide range of spectacles, lenses and frames for worldwide sale, has achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 143.26% over the past two years.
As well as making Inspecs the South West’s top performer, its expansion also put it at number 19 in the UK Top 100 of the ORESA Growth Index.
Started three years ago by consultancy ORESA, the index is the definitive ranking of the UK companies with the fastest growing sales, created to celebrate the companies that have supercharged growth and the leaders that have inspired and driven it.
Inspecs, which was launched in London in 1988 by former bond trader Robin Totterman and later relocated it to Bath, saw record sales of £203.3m in 2023 as it overcame supply chain issues and a boardroom shake-up.
It also moved into the black, turning 2022’s £7.7m loss into a pre-tax profit of £200,000.
Last month the London Stock Exchange-quoted firm, which supplies retailers, distributors and independent opticians across the globe, said it was on course for strong growth this year following completion of a new, state-of-the-art 8,000 sq m manufacturing facility in Vietnam.
Its historic Gloucester-based lens manufacturing business Norville, which it acquired in 2020, is also expected to grow strongly.
Also in the ORESA Growth Index is Corsham-based Medical Wire & Equipment (MWE), which makes world-beating specialist swabs and specimen collection vials.
The privately owned firm is ranked at No. 68 with a CAGR of 77.95% and sales of 40.5m in the year to June 2022.
MWE was established more than 70 years ago in founder Stanley Broggio’s garden shed. In 1975 it revolutionised the industry with its ground-breaking Transwab and in 2020 secured a £1.45m finance package from Barclays to help the NHS’s Covid-19 testing.
Two other South West businesses also feature in the Top 100 table – Bristol-based B2B learning and development platform Sponge, in 42nd place with a CAGR of 94.97%, and Nationwide Engineering Group, a Salisbury-headquartered civil engineering company, at No. 56 with a CAGR of 82.43%.
The overall UK winner was Basingstoke-based InstaVolt, the country’s largest electric vehicle fast charging network, with an unparalleled exponential compound annual growth of 362.55%.
Orlando Martins, founder of ORESA and the Growth Index, said: “What our findings this year confirm, for me, is that growing revenue and making a profit are not mutually exclusive goals.
“This is something to be welcomed, not least because profitability is an essential feature of good growth: without it, an enterprise cannot be sustainable.”
