Father turns spare room into thriving business
A father-of-two from Brewood has turned a spare room hobby into a thriving small business and has now gained a distributor in the United States and a sales outlet at a shop in Lichfield.
Paul Parry, aged 49, admits to always having taken things apart, from the age of three.
Now his Bad Dog Design company, based at Penkridge, through which he markets his Nixie Tube Clocks, is among only a handful across the world.
Paul said: "Since I was a child I have always taken things apart to see how they work and put them back again.
"Fascinated with electronics I remember when my parents stopped buying me toys and instead my father would take me to the local scrapyard, and I would take home a car full of old radios and televisions and goodness knows what else to dismantle and put together again.
"I remember Nixie tubes from some of the equipment I used to dismantle.
"They were used in many electronic gadgets of the time from petrol pumps to military equipment as well as calculators and displays and were the same as the old radio and television valves."
Paul's unique and individual clocks, made from vintage Nixie tubes and other pieces of equipment, have quickly caught on in popularity and his hobby turned into a full-time job when he gave up work as systems manager for the M6 Toll Road.
His wife, Karen, aged 52, also left her job as customer account manager with the M6 Toll, to help with the developing business.
Now Paul's one-off designs have also gone on sale at Bespoke in Lichfield.
Paul, who appears on the BBC Money For Nothing programme, added: "Each of my designs is constructed from salvaged tubes or old stock and sell from between £99 and £9,000.
"They vary from a pigeon-timer clock, sound-level meter clock, electric fence control box design to a Bush radio clock, guitar clocks and even ones made from a biscuit barrel or full-sized robot.
"We get a lots of orders particularly towards Christmas and last year sold 938 clocks and this year, to date, have sold a total of 537.
"A lot of people like the Nixie Tube Clocks because they are unique and retro and there are a lot of people who remember their grandparents having certain items such as a Bush radio in the home.
"People like them as a unique pieces to own and also as art and this is a way of recycling items and saving them from being thrown away or going to landfill."
