Pellon Autocentre celebrates 21 years

The people at Pellon Autocentre are celebrating the company’s 21st year in business, following the firm’s anniversary in February. To mark the occasion they are having a new website built, which is designed to bring all their online web services into one place.

Eric Roberts managing director of Pellon Tyre and Auto Centre started out in 1989, when he bought a two bay small tyre business in Halifax, Yorkshire. At this stage the company only sold cheap tyres, usually re-treads or low cost budget brands. “At the beginning it was very tough,” Eric explained: ” “we had receptionist called Debbie, who still works for me now, and two tyre fitters, the first day we had a snow fall and all hell broke loose, we struggled to cope but got there in the end.” Before long Pellon was doing MOT testing and car menu servicing and the turnover began to steadily climb.

In the nineties Roberts introduced a new point of sale computer system from a well known auto software company TEAM (Tyre and Exhaust Management). This step forward helped Pellon Tyres move on to expand into other auto related things, such as mechanical work and batteries and exhaust systems.

“This was mainly due to our increased capacity of stock holding available to us from our new TEAM computer system. We then rented a small warehouse near by and became Bosal exhaust and catalytic converter stockists. Pellon were also able to improve their battery side of the business, by including leisure and mobility batteries into their range along with car batteries and started trading their own brand called Pennine batteries, this was very successful but it was soon apparent that they would need a leading brand to trade with Pennine batteries and after trying different ones settled Lucas Batteries, this turned out to be a good move and the company use this brand today.”

The next move was the formation of the firm’s first web site in 2001 – pellonautocentre.com. This was primarily an informational web site, but in 2009, Eric Roberts introduced a tyre selector which led him to start offering tyres online. The company also opened batteriesontheweb.co.uk to sell leisure and mobility batteries across the UK. This was introduced after the successful opening of the business’s E-Bay shop in 2009.

Looking forward, Roberts is very excited about the future and has one or two new ideas up his sleeve, including the merger of his two web sites into one and his newly found love of blogging, offering his vast experience in the garage and tyre trade to others through his blog at pellonautocentre.com/blog.

Pellon Autocentre describes itself as “one of the leading companies in its field in the North of England,” adding: “indeed as far as batteries go it is a leading player in the whole of the UK.” But as far as tyres are concerned the company is in close relationships with leading wholesaler Micheldever, which has a huge distribution centre in Elland about four miles from Halifax, giving the company close access to multi-million pounds worth of tyre stock.