Avon Group

Avon Group began in 1979 in Bristol, when Alan Rushin founded Avon Gasket Manufacturing, starting out with a fairly narrow product line: gaskets, seals, joints, and washers. At that point it was a genuinely small operation, employing around 30 people with a turnover of about £2.5 million. In 1997, Rushin’s sons, James and Mark, took over the business, and that handover marked the start of a much more deliberate push to diversify and grow.

The real acceleration came from 2000 onward, when the company embarked on an ambitious acquisition strategy, folding in new businesses and capabilities rather than growing organically alone. That approach built the multi-site, multi-disciplinary group Avon operates as today, still 100% British-owned and still family-run, with Mark Rushin now serving as Group Managing Director and sole shareholder.

The group now runs nine manufacturing companies across the UK, a Bristol headquarters at South Liberty Lane, plus sites in South Wales, Wiltshire, and the Midlands, alongside sales and distribution hubs reaching into North America and Asia. Each operates as its own autonomous business with distinct skills, but together they let Avon offer customers something harder to find elsewhere: a single-source supplier spanning aerosol gaskets, automotive components, sealing, insulation, acoustic materials, filtration, and technical foam products.

One of its companies, Scandura, is the oldest established gasket manufacturer in the UK. Avon says that breadth, covering so many connected disciplines under one group, is something competitors struggle to match, particularly for large customers looking to consolidate suppliers.

The investment has kept pace with that growth, more than £30 million put into the business over the past decade, with a further £3 million planned for the current year. Avon now employs over 550 people, owns the freeholds on all its sites, and holds a staff retention rate above 90%. Forty-six years after Alan Rushin started out with a small gasket business, Avon Group is now aiming to break £100 million in turnover for the first time, continuing a run of growth built on the same mix of innovation and acquisition that’s defined the company since his sons took it over in 1997.