Three decades after one interviewed the other for a junior lab role, Rob Brearley and Darren Rhodes are running Glazerite together, and still learning from each other
The interview took place in Halifax, in 1995. Darren Rhodes, head of department at Carrington Wire, sat across from a 17-year-old applying for his first job as a junior lab technician. That teenager was Rob Brearley.
“Rob came across very well in the interview for such a young man,” Darren recalls. “We were looking for someone with enthusiasm and Rob had that in spades.”
More than 30 years on, the pair run Glazerite together. Rob is Group Managing Director, Darren is Managing Director of its Northern sites. The company they lead now bears the imprint of a working relationship that has outlasted several industries, two decades apart, and one steel wire factory that no longer defines either of their careers.
After Carrington Wire, Rob and Darren spent roughly a decade together in steel, learning wire manufacturing from the ground up. Then their paths diverged, Rob into food manufacturing, Darren into mattresses and springs, but the conversations never stopped.
“We always liked to share best practice between ourselves,” Darren says. “We had very similar manufacturing careers in terms of learning about lean manufacturing and different ways of working. You can never know everything, so we’d talk about what Rob had learned from his experience and what I’d learned from running different businesses.”
Their paths crossed again by coincidence when Rob joined Sash in Barnsley and found Darren running an operation on the neighbouring site. Rather than treat proximity as incidental, they used it: teams from each factory visited the other, swapping ideas about production and process across the fence line.
The reunion at Glazerite was more deliberate. Five years ago, Rob was involved in the company’s management buyout, and the Group’s northern operations gave him the chance to bring Darren in properly.
“We’d probably been talking about working together for five years before that,” Rob says. “We’re very like-minded. We’ve got the same sort of operational energy, business thinking and approach to culture, so I always had it in mind that we’d work together again.”
What they share, both say, traces back to where they started: on the shop floor, not above it. That history now shows up in how they move through the business, walking the factory floor regularly, talking to fabricators and line workers by name, not just by output.
“We like to get to know people. We know their names and we know what interests them,” Darren says. “We might be talking about cycling with one person and football with another. We think being personable is important because that’s where we came from. We were once working on the shop floor, putting things together ourselves.”
That ethos has spread through Glazerite’s wider leadership team, built around what Rob describes simply: “Customer focus, care about people, culture, making good products and making sure the business is healthy for the future.”
It’s not a manufacturing philosophy dressed up for a strategy deck. It’s two men who met in a Halifax interview room 30 years ago, still comparing notes on how factories, and the people in them, work best.
