Our history

We celebrate James Heal’s 150th Birthday, with a year of celebratory promotion and reflection of James Heal through the years, detailing our rich history.

The milestone will be marked with a big celebration in an authentic woollen spinning mill near Halifax, commemorating 150 years of thriving business from our heart in Yorkshire.

James Heal continues to expand across the globe, with teams based in the UK, France, Thailand, USA, and most recently opening a new office in Monchengladbach, Germany.

Our network of agents and distributors now covers 96 countries and 6 continents.

The Performance Range is launched at ITMA exhibition in Barcelona. The arrival of this range solidifies James Heal as a major player in the textiles innovation and testing industry, moving us forward from core textiles testing solutions to being a modern and innovative market leader in high performance materials testing.

PPT Group expands, with the acquisition of Mecmesin, a global force and torque test instrument manufacturer, adding a sister brand to James Heal in the Physical Properties Testers Group. Mecmesin’s portfolio includes testing instruments for a wide variety of industries including automotive, medical/pharma and packaging. 

Venture capital company Battery Ventures purchases James Heal from the Repper family, after 68 years of their dedication and entrepreneurship, having built the framework for what James Heal is today as a global brand. James Heal becomes the first brand in the ‘PPT Group’ of physical properties testers.

Having increased our exports by 43% over three years, we won a second Queen’s Award - this time for enterprise in international trade. The award put us in an elite group of businesses, who have been honoured more than once. It was a fitting reward for the hard work and dedication of our excellent workforce!

After 139 years of being James H Heal & Co Ltd, we modernised our image and rebranded ourselves as simply ‘James Heal’. But, it was much more than just a name change. Our appearance, our style, our product signature and our all areas of our business were updated to reflect an innovative, progressive and dynamic company.

Our instruments were well established and the time had come to diversify a little. As a result, we started the manufacture of test materials, the standardised products needed to use most of our instruments. The creation of a ‘mini textile mill’ alongside precision engineering created a powerful synergy of activities.

This was a momentous year for the company. Exports of our textile testing instruments broke all previous records. In April, we were rewarded and honoured for our achievements by the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement, the highest and most prestigious corporate business award in the United Kingdom.

As our business continued to expand we were running out of space so, when the opportunity arose to purchase the adjacent mill, we took it.

The floor area of the two mills is approximately 10,000 square metres. The mills have been extensively developed and restored to match the needs of a modern manufacturing business.

At the time, the industry was changing. Retailers and manufacturers had begun to realise that they could differentiate their products by implementing proper quality assurance regimes.

So, the time was right to devote all our energies and resources to the development of fabric and colour fastness testing equipment.

To cope with increasing demand for our products, both at home and abroad, we moved into Lake View Mill, a former textile mill built around 1850.

At the time the mill was virtually derelict, but was gradually restored to cater for the requirements of a growing business.

The company was purchased by Harry Repper, an apprentice-trained mechanical engineer.

James H Heal was at that time manufacturing a limited range of mainly yarn testing instruments, including wrap reels, yarn count balances, single thread and hank strength testers and moisture testing ovens.

This is the first compelling evidence of early testing instruments.

The document is a delivery note, dated 12 June 1899, covering the supply of a twist tester to a local textile mill (Slater and Sons). The text describes how to determine the number of ‘turns per inch’ in a length of yarn.

The company was first established in Halifax during 1872 by George James Henry Heal during the industrial revolution.

We don’t know much about the original James Heal, but we do know that the company started out as a Mill Supplier and Furnisher, and served the needs of the then vibrant wool textile industry in the area.