Island Life Magazine Ltd June/July 2009 | Page 120

life

LOCAL BUSINESS

Photo: Adam Wood, David Wood, Jenny Wood, Ian Miller

Woods Trade Supplies
celebrates 40 years
It was back in 1969 from the family home in
Sandown that the company then called
L.G. Wood & Son began, when Dave Wood
and his late father Len Wood decided to
break away from their current employer to
start up their own plumbing and heating
engineering business. Dave had recently
finished serving his plumbing apprenticeship
at the firm where his father had worked for
the past 23 years but now this father and son
team wanted to venture out on their own.
In the early years the company was run
from the family kitchen table, but the
business quickly began to grow and in early
1970s premises were brought in George
Street Sandown, this consisted of a small
office and store area.
These were the days when many homes
and businesses where just being upgraded to
modern central heating systems and bigger
and better opportunities were just over the
horizon. Shortly afterwards Woods was one
of only two contractors on the Island to be

120

Article by Jo Macaulay
awarded a southern gas board contract to
install central heating in many homes across
the Island. The business quickly expanded
from employing three fitters to 28 fitters in
the space of only a few years.
“We’d get eight new central heating jobs a
week – it was ridiculous,” said Dave. “One
of the first big sites we did was the White
City amusement arcade with over 40 flats
above it in Sandown”.
“Whilst being so busy our store soon
became untidy so we employed a store man
to tidy up. This is when we noticed we had
accumulated some excess stock. We then
soon placed an advert in the local paper to
sell off some of this stock, and that’s how
we started selling plumbing supplies, it
just grew from there,” said Dave who had
no idea quite how big this business was to
become.
In the mid 1970s Woods moved to larger

premises in Melville Street in Sandown.
This site offered a larg W"7F