Creativity’s at our core
Creativity, Quality, Passion
At Congo Blue we believe that our greatest asset is our team of committed and dedicated event professionals. Each and every one of them is passionate about and enjoy the industry. Our team is encouraged and demonstrate their individual and innate creativity to deliver great solutions and innovative ideas for our clients. Our delivery across a diverse range of market places gives us a unique view on event delivery and helps keep our ideas fresh.
At Congo Blue we strive for excellence and push hard to ensure that the quality of our solutions is maintained no matter how squeezed the budgets may become.
We excel and deliver great value when we can integrate our creative solutions with all disciplines, audio, video, lighting and Scenic from one roof. This delivers a coherent, stress free solution for our clients.
In 2017 we joined forces with our friends at SFL. This partnership has allowed us to grow and expand our expertise, giving us access to a huge inventory of state of the art equipment to deliver for our clients. As part of this partnership we have created a dedicated 7000sq ft scenic workshop with a full time team of scenic professionals to deliver Congo’s brand of creativity more effectively. Ben Teale, founder of Congo Blue is still part of the team, now able to focus his energy on his passion of design.
Built on proper northern values
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The birth of Congo Blue
Ben Teale had previously owned and built a similar business in Hull, having learned that partnerships can be difficult, he sold his stake and moved down south to start a new branch of Litestructures, once that was off the ground he tried a short spell of working within a much larger production company (Stage Electrics), but knew that running his own company was the future!
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Congo values
With the past experiences under his belt, Congo Blue was born with a specific set of values..
- A fair days work, for a fair days Pay!
- Be where you said you would be, when you said you would be there..
- Creativity first
- Great customer service
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From a small garage to Headley Park
Congo Blue began in Ben’s garage at home, but quickly added a small scenic workshop at a local farm from which Congo’s Blues creative designs could take shape.
Within a year Congo Blue took a lease on a unit in the Headley Park 10, industrial estate, Reading, where they became neighbours with SFL Group and developed a close working relationship. 3 years later Congo Blue were busting at the seams and moved to Wokingham station ind estate to more than double warehouse space. Congo Blue continued to service clients within their niche market and became the go to team for full production service within the exhibition industry.
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A new home in Wokingham
After 5 years of more steady growth, Congo Blue had once again doubled in size, and moved in to two brand new warehouses in Anglo Industrial Park. This move allowed for the separation of the scenic side of the business into its own linked space. This move has proved to be highly successful allowing the team to innovate an create our unique take on show gadgets and automation.
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A partnership with SFL Group
5 more years and the realisation that we couldn’t grow further in our current model along with Ben Teale’s personal realisation that having built a business that was now greater than the sum of its parts, Ben had the opportunity to reflect on the fact that he was spending most of his time administrating the company and not pursuing his real passion of design.
