A special feature on Tibard produced for Wellcome Collection. Reproduced here with kind permission from Tibard. Photography by Carmel King and words by Kate Wilkinson.

Many workplaces have seen significant changes due to COVID-19. Photographer Carmel King documents how one factory went from making hospitality clothing to producing PPE and uniforms for NHS workers.

Tibard have been making uniform in Dukinfield, an industrial area six miles east of Manchester, since 1991. The 20,000 square feet of factory is fitted with daylight bulbs, providing strong, clean light for the women who operate the sewing machines. If you climb up the raised gangway, you can see a wide view of the machinists sitting at workstations dotted across the factory floor like little islands surrounded by pools of green, blue and white fabric.

The two-metre distance between each machinist and the tension in the air are clues that this is not an ordinary day at Tibard. Instead of making the chef’s whites they are used to, they are working on an entirely new product: hospital scrubs.

On Monday 16 March, Boris Johnson told the nation to avoid all “non-essential” travel, but he didn’t tell restaurants, bars and pubs to close until the Friday of that week. At Tibard, orders “fell off a cliff overnight” as hospitality businesses went into limbo – remaining open but with no customers.

One restaurant chain had been developing a new range of uniform and Tibard had just got 1,500 pieces of clothing ready for trial. But everything came to a screeching halt. The uniform was packed away as the waiters and kitchen staff who would have worn them stayed at home.

Meanwhile, NHS trusts up and down the country were suddenly in desperate need of more personal protective equipment (PPE), scrubs and gowns. Increased global demand exhausted the normal supply routes and procurement became chaotic. Connected by one of their main fabric suppliers who were part of an NHS supply chain, Tibard stepped into the fray. In a few days they had arranged a contract that would usually have taken months.

Adapting at speed

When this new order for 12,000 scrubs came in, the main challenge for the machinists was getting used to the new fabric. The polyurethane-coated polyester fabric used to make them was very different from the cotton the machinists were used to sewing for chef’s whites. But the team learned fast and worked together to get production going again as quickly as possible.

They had the skills already, but it took time to return to normal levels of efficiency, at which point they were moved on to another product: after the scrubs came 2,300 medical gowns. A process of creating patterns, making samples and testing them internally, which ordinarily takes months, happened in a matter of days.

Surgical gowns and shrouds

Andy Shackleton and Ian Mitchell, at the helm of Tibard, have had to respond swiftly to a potentially disastrous time for the company. It was stressful but they’ve managed to spot opportunities to continue working. Ian says, “There are a lot of companies profiting out of the position the country’s in, the world’s in; all we’re doing is keeping the furnace of production alive, as well as covering overheads.”

They’re also responding to drastic changes in supply and demand during unprecedented times for industry and the NHS.

Along with the larger gown order came a smaller order for dark fabric to create shrouds to cover bodies. Receiving that order “made it a bit more real” and took Andy and Ian out of their busy Tibard bubble for a moment of reflection. Then they returned to their focus on the production line, creating the PPE, the scrubs and the gowns to help the NHS keep going.