News & Blog

Meet Seb

 

Please join us in welcoming Seb Owen, our Account Manager and Sustainability Manager. With a deep understanding of our Home and Business chargers and accessories, Seb is a quick thinker who holds a master’s degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, specialising in Green Criminology. His expertise shines through in every conversation, making him the go-to person for sales or product inquiries. Seb gives straightforward, practical advice, which is perfect if you’re new to e-mobility. He talks about Home Energy Managers, Business Freestanding Chargers, Octopus Go Energy Tariffs, oh, and if you like West Ham, well of course, he’d talk about that too!

 

Here’s his first blog:

How is Simpson & Partners green?

Greener energy

The aim of greener energy and transport is to make the world a greener, more sustainable place. By moving away from fossil fuels, and into renewables, the underpinning theme is to make things greener. This is especially true for us at Simpson and Partners where our aim/commitment is to build a cleaner future. By putting sustainability at the heart of our decision making, we are shaping the future one charger at a time.

 

The smallest changes can have the biggest effects

From my time studying Green Criminology at University to attain my Bacherlors Degree, and subsequently my Master’s Degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, I have had a passion for all things sustainable for years. I endorse, and believe in, the transition to a greener world and have come to realise that as much as we need big changes, it is also the small changes that can have the biggest effects.

I joined Simpson and Partners in October 2023 as a sales support specialist and sustainability champion. I soon moved on to being the Account Manager and Sustainability Manager after a few months. The first thing I noticed when joining, was the in-house manufacturing and production process. I was impressed by the operation where you can see how our chargers are manufactured at different stages of the build and thought this could be a blueprint for more UK SMEs moving forward. SME’s make up 99% of the UK business population. And S&P are one of them. We have full control over how we design and produce our products. If something needs improving, we action it. If we can streamline a process, then we do.

Seb getting technical

Quality driven purpose

We have specifically chosen a route that is a step in the other direction to mass production and more towards quality and purpose. We want to move away from “throw away culture” and “planned obsolescence” so that customers can have a product that will still be in use for years to come. The engineering of S&P chargers has been specifically designed so that individual components can be replaced, covers can be swapped out, and almost everything on it can be repaired without the need to replace a whole sealed unit, as has become commonplace in our world today. This is a step back to the traditions of repair and not replace. I always like to use the analogies of cars today. 90s cars would have screws everywhere for you to carry out most work yourself if needed, they were mechanical. Today, because of the high amount of tech and computers, cars often come as sealed units that need to be sent to a garage when they go wrong.  Our ev chargers are similar to the 90s cars, but with modern tech so that our customers can enjoy the smart features with the practicality and comfort of knowing they can repair most things on it if needed.

Mend and repair

For me, this is how the future of manufacturing should be done, where we can begin to work towards a circular economy, and away from wasteful practices. However, our sustainable ideology does not stop at our products. Supply chains are a vital piece in any business looking to become greener which is why we have a big emphasis on what we like to call our “hyper local supply chain”. In essence, we utilise as many local businesses as possible to ensure that our overall carbon footprint is as low as we can make it, with a constant emphasis on improving it. Obviously, we would love to manufacture everything in house but unfortunately this is not possible so we try to utilise local businesses where we can to reduce our impact on the environment, and to support other SME businesses along the way. Small steps together, we will create a greener, healthier world for generations to come and pave the way for this business model to become standard practice.

 

L-R Chas Beecham, Business Series 22kW Dual, Seb Owen