PP C&A backs Newport Girls’ High School for national award

The Tag-Along team

Staffordshire-based PP Control & Automation (PP C&A), one of the UK’s leading strategic manufacturing outsourcing specialists has thrown its support behind a Shropshire school vying for national honours. The company, which employs 230 people at its facility in Cheslyn Hay, has been mentoring three teams at Newport Girls’ High School (NGHS) in the Young Enterprise Awards programme.

PP C&A’s CEO Tony Hague has been involved from the start of the competition, providing advice and commercial guidance to the budding business leaders on how to develop and bring to market a new product. It has been a successful partnership with NGHS winning seven out of 10 categories at the recent Shropshire awards and one of its entries, Tag-Along, was chosen to represent the county at the wider West Midlands final, where it again came out on top.

The product is designed for users to attach belongings to themselves or to items such as bags, suitcases and pushchairs. Nearly £2,500 of profit has already been generated through trade fairs and online sales, with the team now setting its sights on taking the national Young Enterprise (YE) title in Manchester on 4 June. If successful, they will then fly to Athens in July to represent the UK on the international stage.

Fantastic local talent
Mr Hague said: “I wished I had the confidence and skills of these young people when I was 17 — their fearlessness and commercial acumen is very impressive. Tag-Along is obviously the team that is competing in the national finals of YE, but there were also two other NGHS teams FlashStash and Attachify — which I supported. They were equally impressive and won several awards in the Shropshire competition, demonstrating the fantastic local talent we have coming through into the business world.”

Pictured right and below: Tag-Along products

He continued: “YE is a fantastic programme, giving young people the opportunity to put some of the theory learned in class into a real-world, commercial project that can give them experience and skills for later in their career.”

At the national finals, NGHS will have to write a company report, present the product and then be grilled by a team of high-profile judges. Tag-Along has already been praised in the early rounds for providing a solution for carrying multiple items on a bag. It was initially designed to support the sports market, but the creative entrepreneurs quickly realised it was an attractive proposition for parents with children, as well as business people rushing to and from meetings.

Environmental credentials
With deals already struck with two football clubs and other commercial partnerships in the making, judges said that the product was ideal for ‘scalability’. There are also plans to launch a sustainable bamboo fibre version of the product to improve the firm’s environmental credentials.

Tulsi Mistry, the 17 year old managing director of Tag-Along, said: “The YE journey has been an incredible experience for us — from creating the product and developing the brand to negotiating with suppliers, agreeing manufacturing deals and securing sales.

“All of this has been done from scratch, with many of us not knowing each other before the project. We have worked out our individual skills, ‘who was good at what’ and pooled it all together to come up with an award-winning product that first won the Shropshire final and then the West Midlands final, beating 13 other teams in the process.

“We have received lots of excellent support from our YE mentor Tony Hague, who has given up so much of his time to provide us with his commercial insight and knowledge of negotiations and sales. All eyes are now on representing Shropshire in Manchester in June and hopefully on the global stage in Athens.”

Involvement in YE is part of PP C&A’s long-term commitment to ‘giving back’. The company has recently established an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) committee to embed sustainability across its operations and this brings together purchasing and supply chain, logistics, HR, IT and senior operations and marketing. This will guide the activity going forward, including the launch of a new campaign due to be announced within the next month.

For further information or to buy the Tag-Along product, please visit the website here.