Nearly four years since completing its HQ, distribution and ceramics centre in Fenton Stoke-on-Trent, Valentine Clays is set to start building a new production facility as part of a wider £4m expansion programme.

The 18,000 sq ft facility will enable the company to bring its business onto one site and will be operational in late summer.

Intium Construction has been appointed for the build with project management support from Prosurv Consult, architects Hulme Upright, services engineer Hopkins Coats, and structural engineer C2C Consulting..

Hannah Ault, director of Valentine Clays, said: “We have worked extremely hard over the past few year’s focusing upon our business growth and it’s exciting to be in a position to complete our next stage of our expansion plans that are aimed at helping our industry to grow.

“Valentine Clays has an ambitious expansion plan, and the continued development of the Fenton site is vital to our aims to increase sales, production and storage capacity and to create new processes to help develop new products.

“Our new production facility will enable us to fulfil the demands that we are currently seeing from our customers worldwide.

“Although COVID has proved challenging for our business we have also seen positive sale increases over previous months, everyone seems to be making from home, and it has also enabled us to focus on restructure and growth.”

The family-run manufacturer has been supplying clay bodies and raw materials in Stoke-on-Trent for the past 40 years and expects the new factory to boost production capacity and create a number of new jobs.