Sustainability and Our Commitment

Sustainability & Our Commitment

At Bennington Carriages, our commitment is to maximise the enjoyment that our customers can expect from Carriage Driving. This means great products and exceptional service.

To ensure that we deliver the very best to our customers, we never forget that as a business we need to operate to the highest possible standards and work in a manner that demonstrates our continued commitment to our employees, our local community and the environment.

We are a family business. Founded by Michael Mart 50 years ago and now run by Michael’s daughters Sue and Wendy, many of our employees have worked at Bennington for over 15 years. We fully recognise that we could not honour our commitment to our customers without them. We recognise that the skills our employees contribute to our carriages being recognised as the ‘crème de la crème’ and it is their continued commitment to doing things right, not quickly, or cheap, that makes the difference.

In recent years we have invested heavily in the development of our Carriage Driving Academy, which combines our manufacturing workshops, showroom and training facilities. Originally a disused dairy farm, we worked with local developers and tradespeople to transform the facility into the wonderful facility we have today.

Set in 10 acres with exceptional views across the Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire countryside, we believe it is a wonderful place to work. Many of our employees walk or cycle to work (weather permitting!) and with our lake and arboretum, which is now maturing nicely and attracting a range of wildlife, many of us choose to escape the frenzy of the workplace to enjoy some fresh air and to relax for a while. Michael often cites ‘a few minutes by the lake’ as a great source of inspiration – including most recently, the new design for our Stealth carriage.

To ensure that we can operate in a sustainable way, we are continually looking for ways to minimise our impact on the environment – using less materials, less energy and reusing whatever we can. Some examples include our bore hole which we source our water from, the solar heating system that we use to heat our water and the digester sewerage system – which all of which were installed by to minimise our impact in terms of water consumption and waste.

In our manufacturing workshops we use modern technology operated by skilled craftspeople to accurately measure, cut and manufacture – which results in greater quality and fewer errors. This leads to lower consumption of raw materials and less energy to process them into finished products. “Measure twice, cut once” is a continual mantra at Bennington Carriages. We carefully consider our workflow too – making batches of components where viable to minimise the time, effort and energy required to produce them, which also ensures we can spend more time on the truly bespoke elements of our products. We also reuse packaging materials where possible and recycle our office paper too.

Our suppliers are also carefully selected. We like to work with people who share our values and provide the very best goods and services. We are fortunate, that in most cases we can source materials and supplies through firms that are located within a 20 mile radius of our location. Many of our suppliers have been providing goods and services to us for over 20 years, which enables us to be confident that they understand our business – and we understand theirs – ensuring we operate in harmony.

In summary, we are a long established family run firm with a commitment to help our customers maximise their enjoyment from Carriage Driving. We have wonderful, highly skilled and loyal staff and a supplier base that shares our values of operating with honesty and integrity.

We are proud to be Bennington Carriages.