A Tribute to Pets

ON your way into Arundel on the A27 from Worthing, passing The Vinery sign on the left, you could be forgiven for thinking it is another Sussex vineyard. But no, it refers to a hidden industrial estate with a thriving community of businesses in a huge variety of industries. Fargro, a horticultural product wholesaler and a marble supplier sit beside twenty furniture outlets who restore, sell and transport antique furniture; Hammerpot Brewery and Goldmark Craft Beers share the space with a company that adapts cars for the police force and motor bike and car specialists; a huge variety of businesses sit side-by-side on the site. Originally a mushroom farm, it was bought about fifteen years ago and turned into a complex of fifty-five industrial units constructed by cladding the polytunnels previously used to cultivate mushrooms.

It is also home to a highly unusual company, Petributes, run by Ness and Richard ‘Bushy’ Bush. The company occupies eight of the units plus the original farmhouse, which is used as their offices. They specialise mainly in making products to contain the ashes of people’s pets. The business started 26 years ago making urns for the funeral trade but it was Ness’s father who suggested the idea of moving into the pet market. Bushy still has the prototype box he designed for his first enquiry from Cambridge Pet Crematorium – who, three weeks after they saw the sample, gave him an order for 700! This quickly turned into a regular monthly order and transformed the business. Bushy still keeps that original order in a frame on the wall. The company now employs 32 people and has a multi-million pound turnover.

Several factors contributed to the development of the company and its products. A Thai friend Bushy met at boarding school helped him source a variety of ideas and designs from craft manufacturers in Thailand – such as carved cats and other items not strictly designed for holding ashes. A marketing course in Worthing gave another dimension to Bushy’ s thinking. When shown the box design the lecturer said ‘OK so it’s a box for ashes but what else is it? It’s also an ornament and as an ornament it’s awful!’ It was the lightbulb moment for Bushy who went away to discover what else you could put ashes into. He says now: ‘It’s the key to our business. Our products are attractive and discreet -you would never know they are urns.’

The product range is amazing – carved wooden dogs and cats; commissioned sculptures of animals; polished and engraved heart shaped boxes which hold just a few ashes as a keepsake; picture frames that can hold ashes and even a framed paw print; urns that can be buried beneath lawns with a tasteful marker plaque which can be removed for mowing – all designed to make the loss of a beloved pet a bit easier to bear. All of these ideas originate at the Bush’s kitchen table and the latest, the Scatter Tube, is no exception. A highly successful product already, it is a cardboard tube printed with a wide variety of attractive designs used to scatter ashes or to store them for transfer at a later date into a permanent memorial. Thousands of these are sold throughout Europe every year.

Bushy’s creativity is not limited to product design – he is a talented artist with examples of his painting on every wall of the building. At Christmas Funeral Director customers get a personalised box containing a bottle of local wine; Christmas cards and calendars, all with a great sense of humour, are everywhere. One series of cards have a Bushy take on famous paintings – The Girl with a Pearl Earring painted with a Christmas bauble in place of the earring, or a Stubbs painting with the horse changed to a reindeer – all with a bar code for mobile phones taking you to information about the original painting.