Roy Thompson, Pro Arte’s founder, had always been a keen and talented artist. He’d grown up loving the romance between easel and canvas and specialised in oil painting. With this skill and art material ambition he joined Winsor and Newton, known for its classy art materials, to work in sales due to his deep artistic knowledge. He progressed through the company with high aspirations to become sales director, but the position never arrived.
As a consequence, he made the decision to break free on his own and specialise in a product that was closest to his heart, brushes! Brushes are tactile, the transition between paint and the canvas or the paper, and he loved the way a good brush could perform this task with ease…
When he began, he didn’t have the means to set up a manufacturing facility, but he had brush making contacts in the UK that were able to supply him with the quality of products he required at advantageous prices. Once he had secured the correct products, his business would then be built on quality, service, and competitive pricing both for the dealer along with the end user. A recipe for success which we have endeavoured to maintain to this day.
Some 10 years since the launch of Pro Arte, his son, Peter joined the business. The primary objective was to create a fully fledged manufacturing facility in order to make not only the best brushes currently available but also to secure Pro Arte’s destiny from distributors to manufacturers without the reliance on outside parties. This came at the perfect moment… One of the factories that supplied the high end soft natural hair, Sable and Squirrel brushes, ceased trading and Pro Arte jumped on an opportunity of employing some of their existing staff as homeworkers. This worked to great effect and gave Peter the opportunity to learn the exacting skills of high quality brush making.
Armed with this knowledge, it then enabled Pro Arte to move with the changing times…. Synthetics had already made their way into the marketplace, but early ranges were often cumbersome and could not compete with the quality of time honoured originals. However, Pro Arte recognised that if they could be developed to a high enough standard, it could revolutionise things forever. As a result, Peter working closely with Roy (the artist) would eventually perfect a serious alternative to natural hair brushes in the form of their ground breaking Prolene. Prolene was already being marketed in a basic form since around the late seventies, but with new advances with hair filaments and grade varieties, Pro Arte took the opportunity of utilising brush making skills with modern manufacturing techniques, to take these brushes to a much higher level. A variety of mixes and blends were adopted dependent on brush size which could make the whole range work very effectively.
Peter now runs the business along with his son Johnny, who joined on a university degree apprenticeship scheme. The ethos of the business is to promote from within giving the opportunity to current staff members to benefit as their experience grows. Johnny has learned all brush manufacturing techniques from the ground up. Business is evolving all the time and the younger generations always bring something new to compete with the ‘old ways’. Here, we like to think we have a good balance between the two.