Company History

The plastic industry expanded rapidly in the 1940s after World War II which created a huge demand for inexpensive, mass-produced products. Selwyn Weston seized upon this new market opportunity establishing S.B. Weston Ltd. as a plastic injection moulding company in 1948.

American inventor James Watson Hendry had built the first screw injection machine a few years earlier in 1946, which allowed precise control over the speed of injection and the quality of articles produced. The new machine design allowed material to be mixed before injection, so that coloured or recycled plastic could be added to virgin material and mixed thoroughly before being injected. It was a machine of this type that Selwyn Weston acquired for his first mould shop in Teddington, West London.

During the 1950’s S.B. Weston found its niche manufacturing for the pharmaceutical industry – in particular ICI, for whom we manufactured agricultural dispensing pumps of Selwyn’s design.

As the plastics industry and its technologies evolved, so S.B. Weston’s collective experience of injection moulding practices grew. The company went from solely producing dispensing pumps on to combs, badges and, over the decades, a vast array of products for industries including the automotive, medical, consumer products, toys, plumbing, packaging, and construction.

Selwyn’s son Tony Weston joined the company in 1962 having completed an engineering apprenticeship at Black & Decker where he met David Dodman who also joined Westons at this time. Upon Selwyn’s death in 1967 Tony and David took over the business and maintained its steady success over the next 30 years. During this time the company changed premises and settled on Platts Eyot, a private island industrial estate on the Thames where they survived the recession of the early 90’s and emerged with Reid Weston, Selwyn’s grandson as the managing director.

One of Reid’s first moves was the implementation of the first of our box tools – the Business Card Box. This product went on to become the company’s key trade item and the starting block for the current range of WestonBoxes which now includes 12 different size products of which we’ve now sold over 100 million units in the U.K and throughout Europe.

In the 90’s, 00’s in addition to boxes, S.B. Weston also became involved in producing modified interior parts for luxury cars. The parts, designed by Tony Weston, included housings for dashtop sat nav screens, DVD monitor housings, glove box CD changer units and many more low volume high unit value scenarios. These projects required expert design, crafting and execution and due to the unit requirement often being quite low, vacuum forming was often used as a cheaper alternative to injection moulding, which as of 2002 was not an issue as S.B.Weston Ltd. had moved to Harris Way Sunbury and leased a space in their new building to Racecraft – a specialist vacuum forming company with whom they worked on many of these projects.

The move that S.B. Weston made from Platts Eyot to Harris Way, enabled further growth and by the 2010’s the company was hitting peak production of WestonBoxes, running 12 NC controlled Demag machines with robotic automation implemented on many production lines. Products were manufactured on 24 hour shifts from Monday to Friday to meet demand and despite the recession, the company also continued to have a busy design / tool building department with new clients and projects emerging frequently.

One such project involved Brian May, the guitarist from rock band Queen, who paid his first visit to S.B.Weston in 2009. Brian was working on a book about a collection of stereoscopic photocards created by pioneering 1850’s photographer T.R. Williams, whose work he had been collecting and researching for the previous 30 years. Brian wanted to create a plastic stereoscopic viewer to accompany the book so that the reader could properly experience the stereoscopic 3D effect created by T.R Williams’ work. The result was the OWL Stereoscope, a flat-packing polypropylene Stereo viewer based on a Victorian design, with snap in acrylic lenses. Brian, a keen supporter of British industry insisted that all the design, toolmaking and manufacturing of the viewer be performed in the UK by S.B. Weston so that he could be involved at every stage of the project. Brian commented on his website, “Working on this injection moulding project has been a whole new voyage of discovery for me. Tony Weston and his team have been a joy to work with, always willing to stretch their design and technical skills to the max.” S.B.Weston continued to work with Brian over the next few years, producing 3 different stereo viewers and various other accessories for the London Stereoscopic company.

In addition to working with celebrity clients, S.B.Weston continued to develop and expand its WestonBoxes brand throughout this period and by 2015 had established its first listings on Amazon. Amazon provided an exciting new platform with the potential to reach many more customers in the UK and EU and the team at Weston’s saw this opportunity and invested time in building and managing listings on the site for its own products.

In 2004 Chris Dodman had joined the company, initially working on the shop floor as machine operator, then warehouse manager and then in 2009, under Tony Weston’s supervision, as a junior product designer. Chris produced CAD models and dimensioned drawings for live clients including Brian May, all the while honing his skills and learning from the decades of experience and engineering expertise of Tony, David and Reid. Towards the end of the 2010’s he was appointed creative director.

2020 saw the arrival of a suite of new electric injection moulding machines to update our capabilities improve efficiency and cut energy costs. The machines were installed just before the outbreak of Coronavirus in May 2020. S.B.Weston saw significant change in customer activity throughout the pandemic but thanks to an increase in online sales, in particular through Amazon, loss of B2B business was offset.

Moving into the mid 2020’s S.B.Weston is working hard to maintain the success of its own products, in particular on Amazon but also through other resellers while also continuing to promote its capabilitries as a one-stop injection moulding solution to customers, offering in-house deign, prototyping, mould tooling and manufacturing capabilities.

Essentially the principal of what S.B. Weston does in terms of injection moulding is still the same as it was for Selwyn Weston way back in 1948. It is simply the technology we now use to design, monitor, maintain and streamline the process that has evolved.