With the digital release of our 2018 Plant Spares & Workshop Catalogues this week, we are looking back at some of the very first L&S catalogues.

You may have seen previously that the first piece of marketing for L&S was created whilst at Middlemore Lane, at this time Alan still worked at Tube Investments. A creative employee photographed the two water pump strainers and printed them on to a headed piece of paper.

The first promotional images, as you can see above, were simple sketches of the parts hand drawn by Alan! Before we used cameras or graphic design software this is how the business would advertise the manufactured parts. All sketches were clearly identifiable and you can see a resemblance of this style in our current exploded diagrams.

The first catalogues were produced whilst at Hazel Lane in Great Wyrley, all the way back in 1980! The catalogues were simple but full of the most popular products at the time. The drawings were a mixture of hand sketches and digital drawings. The catalogue was the first of it's type for L&S and was instantly recognisable & helpful for those who used it. Below you can see an image of the pump strainer featured on the front cover, this was a very popular part that was manufactured by Alan & Wyn.

When the product range expanded there was a need to create a brand new catalogue layout, similar to the design you can see today. This format has essentially stayed the same over the years, adding more products every year with gradual design improvements over time. The design is instantly recognisable as the L&S Catalogue. As you can see from the 1994 catalogue below the book started to be bound, meaning that the book was easier for the customer to use and find what they wanted. You can also see that the parts diagrams became more detailed. Due to the ever growing range of products, part numbers were also introduced to help identify the correct part when ordering.

Below you can see a familiar product featured in the 1994 catalogue, GT85 that we still sell today. With the bigger book came the opportunity to highlight more products and part descriptions became longer to include more information for the customer. As you can see from the front cover, the design has changed quite a bit over the years.

Flash forward to 2018 and you can see how the catalogues have moved forward (there's now two of them!). As you can see things have changed quite a bit! The images are all high quality and the parts are organised by machine or type. You may notice that there is still a likeness to the original catalogues, with the line drawings and clear lists of part numbers.

New, you can even search through the catalogues online, making it even easier to find everything you need. Click to view our new Plant Spares Catalogue or our Workshop Catalogue