A meeting back in 1986 between Peter Teire and Encoder Products then owners, Bill and Fern Watts, led to the founding of the UK and European division of Encoder Products, “British Encoder Products”.
At the time, Peter and his wife Ve lived in the US and longed to move back to the UK. Opening a new UK branch for Encoder Products was the perfect opportunity to fulfil that desire.
After returning to the UK, Peter Teire, a former engineer at Hohner Automation, renewed acquaintances with his colleagues from the industry and in 1987, in a small unit in Wrexham, with just a few employees, the first line of encoders went out of production.
While working as an electrical engineer in Southern California in the 1960s, Idaho native Bill Watt noticed an issue with motion feedback applications: motion feedback applications were moving toward the use of modern (at the time) counters and programmable logic controllers (called PLCs), but the encoder solutions on the market at the time did not provide an output to feed directly into these devices.
So, Bill Watt invented one. It was the first product from Bill’s new company, which he called Encoder Products Company (EPC).
For the first few years, Bill operated the new business out of the garage of his family home in Orange County, California. Through the years, EPC’s talented engineers have continued to innovate and develop new encoders to meet the changing needs of the motion control industry.
In the early days, the range of encoders produced at Wrexham was limited with some models being imported from the US. Since then the brand has grown significantly and today British Encoder Products employs over 40 staff. Some of the employees who were part of that initial team are still with the company and now play an integral role in management and daily operations.
British Encoder Products Company now offers a wide range of both incremental and absolute encoders, serving customers as far afield as Africa and Australia from our purpose-built facility in Wrexham.
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