Bonner of Ireland, a Donegal-based knitwear business, plans to develop more of its own brand products in order to grow the business alongside its successful white-label product line.
Bonner of Ireland was founded by Cornelius and Bernadette Bonner in 1976, with their son Eamonn Bonner running the business today. The business is based in Ardara and had revenue of €1 million last year.
“We’re a sweater manufacturing company. We started off with hand-knitting and use modern technology now to carry on the tradition of hand-knit style sweaters and cardigans. We use all-natural products,” Eamonn Bonner told the Business Post.
The business grew out of Cornelius Bonner’s prior work with another knitwear business, called McDevitt’s.
“My father started work very young and was at McDevitt’s for a good few years. He moved to another hand-knit company in Ardara and went all over the world. He had an idea that the next step in the sector would be hand-flat machines. He approached his boss and suggested using those machines but he had no interest,” Bonner said.
“My father decided that he’d give it a go so he went and set up himself with my mother.”
The route for Eamonn Bonner towards joining the family business was direct, and he relished the opportunity to be involved.
“When it’s a family business, you tend to get involved young. From a young age I was out with my father. I officially started in 1986 and, because we had hand-flats, there was a lot of production involved so I moved to a supervisory role,” he said.
“My father had great vision and he recognised the next move was to use electronic knitting machines. I moved into the CAD [computer aided design] side of that. I’ve become an all-rounder, that helps me understand the business very well.”
The unique nature of Bonner of Ireland’s work means that it tends to retain staff for the long haul, with some people working for the company for more than 30 years.
Bonner described that experience as irreplaceable. He took charge of the business during the 2000s, effectively being in sole command after 2008 when his father died. At around that time, the company faced its most significant challenges.
“A lot of manufacturing went to Eastern Europe and China. It was quite hard but then we started working with designer brands, which has been quite successful for us. Often they’d know what they wanted with a sweater but wouldn’t understand the technology,” he said.
“We could fill in those blanks for them. That’s been hugely successful for us.”
Bonner of Ireland is supported by Enterprise Ireland. Bonner said the agency had provided valuable insight.
“The first thing people think of is the grants, but they have great people in there that we can talk to. They are so valuable for the advice they provide. Grants are useful but the knowledge they have is so good and they have people all over the world we can reach out to,” he said.
The business wants to keep growing its white-label business but Bonner is keen to grow the company’s own-brand more.
“We want to build our own-brand more while also adding more designer brands as partners. We want to find people who fit with us,” Bonner said.
“We want to expand and get bigger. [Though] we don’t need to get too big because we offer something special.”
This Making it Work article was produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland