MEACO
About the company
When Chris and Michelle Michael founded Meaco in 1991, the aim was to specialise in monitoring and control equipment for museums and art galleries. In 1992, Meaco developed the world's first radio-based environmental monitoring system in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This gave Meaco a much higher profile and over the next 10 years, Meaco established itself as one of the most important suppliers of humidity monitoring and control equipment to museums across Europe.
In 1999, Meaco approached Mitsubishi Electric to become their exclusive distributor of portable dehumidifiers in the UK. This marked the beginning of a successful relationship that thrived for the next 20 years.
In 2005, Chris and Michelle sold the museum part of the business so they could focus their efforts on the rapidly growing domestic dehumidifier market.
In 2009, expansion continued and Meaco became a manufacturer of dehumidifiers, drawing on the experience gained from working in museums, distributing Mitsubishi Electric and listening to customers to ensure that every dehumidifier not only solves the problem but also improves the user's quality of life.
Meaco is now internationally regarded as a leading player in this industry, selling to over 20 countries across Europe, North America and South Africa. Export accounts for 50% of the business and is creating an increasing number of jobs right here in the UK.
Suppliers, customers and competitors regard Meaco as the benchmark for quality and innovation. We have pushed the industry to reduce the energy consumption of dehumidifiers and it has been pleasing to see how many of our competitors have followed our example in this area, so customers can now benefit from lower electricity bills.
Another area for us was noise and in this area we achieved significant improvements in 2018 and continue to strive to reduce the noise levels of our products without compromising low energy consumption.
In 2019, we removed all plastic hoses from our dehumidifiers, reducing the amount of plastic going to waste by 75,000 metres. In 2020, this increased to 130,000 metres. We continue to encourage other manufacturers to follow our example so that together we can reduce the amount of plastic unnecessarily used worldwide each year in millions of ways.
In 2020, we replaced several hundred thousand pieces of polystyrene in our packaging with recyclable cardboard. This costs us more and reduces profits, but it is an important step forward in reducing the burden on the planet and again is something all manufacturers should focus on.
We are very proud to have received all the awards for our products from companies such as Which?, Good Housekeeping, QuietMark and Stiftung Warentest, to name but a few, but we are equally proud of the excellent feedback we receive daily from customers, who greatly value the support of our dedicated customer service team and how our products help them in their daily lives.
As a company, we have supported local youth sports for many years, especially rugby and swimming, and we are now delighted to be working closely with the local David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) to support their orphaned elephant in Zambia.
